


aperture

by perennials



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Getting Together, M/M, Photography, that's it. that's all i'm saying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-20 02:56:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15524538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: Kuroo’s gotten very good at smiling over the years, so he should be giving Bokuto a smile like a dream in a plastic bottle, cap screwed on tight to keep the oxygenated hope inside from leaking out.He doesn't.“You're a terrible flirt,” he drawls.Bokuto grins, sharp and bright. “You're terrible at not being attractive.”-This is a story about Kuroo Tetsurou, silver windbreakers, and swans.





	aperture

**Author's Note:**

> im back fuckers

_Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us._

_These, our bodies possessed by light._

_Tell me we’ll never get used to it._

  
  


Bokuto Koutarou moves into the apartment unit next door on Saturday.

 

Kuroo doesn't exactly _see_ him, but he does hear all about it. There are boxes and stray items littered all across the hallway whenever he sticks his head out of his front door, a landscape that oscillates like sand dunes in the desert. Next door, a violent cross between an evening soap opera and a nightclub scene, interspersed with the sheer cadence of _murder,_ rages on passionately for the better part of the day.

 

So, for Kuroo, everything begins on Saturday.

 

Even if he hadn't been mildly curious then about the photographs strewn like love letters everywhere, or the occasional thump that sounded like a pickaxe coming into contact with something decisively solid, he probably would have opened that door anyway. There are a lot of doors in Kuroo’s head, and he keeps them shut most of the time, but sometimes things slip through. It's like that.

 

But, back to the matter of the photographs. Halfway through the day, a box falls over and explodes, a flurry of photographs spilling out through the resulting black hole. The shuffle of paper draws Kuroo out again. He's almost tempted to step outside and help even though he's still wearing the clothes he slept in last night, but then his neighbor’s door slams open and a blurry figure dashes out. For half a second, Kuroo sees a head of white and gray hair flickering in the hallway.

 

He thinks of swans.

 

Later on, when he heads out to get groceries, he notices a photograph caught under the elevator door like something forgotten in the aftermath of a disaster. He picks it up and slips it into the pocket of his jeans.

 

//

 

Bokuto Koutarou moves into the apartment unit next door on Saturday, but perhaps it would be more apt, in the grander scheme of things, to say that the story begins on Sunday. At six o’clock. In the morning.

 

It should also be noted that Kuroo, like most sane people, is not awake at six o’clock in the morning on Sundays. In fact, there should be some kind of unspoken rule about bothering people at six o’clock in the morning on Sundays. No one deserves to be subjected to that kind of pain. Not even the worst kind of person; not even Kuroo.

 

He goes to get the door when the doorbell goes off anyway, blinking the sleep out of his eyes and thinking about the _How To Hide A Dead Body_ wikihow article Oikawa sent him the other day.

 

Stifling a yawn, Kuroo peers blearily out into the hallway. It's the middle of June, which means that Tokyo’s sun is already beaming down at its measly human subjects from its vantage point in the sky, leaving the hallway awash in shades of brilliant gold—

 

“Oh— hi!”

 

Kuroo _jumps_.

 

“Sorry, shit, did I scare you? I swear I didn't mean to do that— uh, you all right there?”

 

Kuroo is not, in fact, all right, having just had half his lifespan startled out of him by his neighbor, who has not only just appeared like a serial killer in his doorway, but also possesses a voice like a bulldozer. He tries to hide it anyway, with little success.

 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he replies shortly, straightening up and schooling his features into an acceptably aloof smile. He runs a hand through his hair out of pure habit.

 

“That's great,” says his neighbor, whose name he doesn't know yet, sounding three parts relieved and maybe one part guilty, if Kuroo squints a bit.

 

So Kuroo squints, and then squints a bit harder, the sleep-haze finally clearing away with the extra effort. He gives the other guy a quick once-over, eyes skimming from a head of gelled up white and gray hair to broad shoulders, muscled legs, black trainers. The oversized silver windbreaker half-hanging off his pretty shoulders like a slice of the moon. He's kind of cute.

 

The silence continues for a spell, during which Kuroo yawns once and then wonders about the surreal, moon-gold glow of his new neighbor’s eyes, and said neighbor simply studies him, something unnameable sitting behind his expression like a specter.

 

“So, uh—”

 

“I’m Bokuto! Bokuto Koutarou,” he says before Kuroo can fully realize his dream of turning around, closing the door, and climbing back into bed. Adulthood has not granted him the wisdom or enlightenment younger him had hoped to receive— sleeping at three the night before was a _fucking shit_ idea.

 

Kuroo nods.

 

“And since I just moved in next door and everything, I figured I'd say hi,” he finishes with this gleaming smile like half a backyard firework, spitting sparks of color and fizzling around the edges.

 

“Mmm,” Kuroo hums, letting his lips curl into a small smile. “I’m Kuroo.”

 

Is it over? It’s probably over. He figures this is the part where their awkward first meeting as neighbors ends. Common sense and convention dictate it so.

 

But Bokuto clears his throat meaningfully instead, revealing his hands which, Kuroo notices belatedly, have been tucked behind his back the entire time. He holds out flowers.

 

“Do you do this every time you have a new neighbor?” Kuroo raises an eyebrow.

 

Bokuto just laughs.

 

//

 

The chrysanthemums _are_ quite beautiful, Kuroo has to admit. He's set them up in a vase he dug up from the storage room and placed them on his dining table, a cluster of soft white flowers with petals unfurling like a lover’s outstretched hands.

 

He doesn't think about how odd it is that his first meeting with Bokuto happened at six in the morning and ended with flowers. He doesn't think about the shape of his smile, and how he can't get it out of his head as easily as he perhaps should be able to. Kuroo doesn't think.

 

But he doesn't go back to sleep, either.

 

_A thunderstorm could arrive at any moment, so you have to close the door._

 

He puts the kettle on, flips open his laptop, and goes back to his manuscript.

 

//

 

In between his erratic work schedule and the endless loop of coffee runs, he barely catches more than fleeting glimpses of Bokuto; taking out the trash in the morning, waiting at the red light outside the _konbini_ across the street in the afternoon, in the stupidly cramped elevator in the late evening. It's not something he can spare much time to think about, so he doesn’t.

 

For the briefest time it almost looks like that’s as far as their newly founded flat-ship is going to go, these funny little nods from Kuroo and loud, megaphone greetings from Bokuto, interspersed throughout each week like speed bumps on a smooth city road.

 

Then Friday happens.

 

It’s one of those days where it feels like every single entity in the universe has decided to conspire against him in a massive, shitfaced operation, cheerfully titled _make Kuroo Tetsurou feel as terrible as is (in)humanly possible._ The bullet train from hell accumulates baggage at a snail’s pace, chipping away at his patience bit by honest, aching bit. By half past noon, he’s ready to give up on his stupid manuscript and his stupid plot and chuck the entirety of his rotten novel-in-the-works in the fucking bin.

 

He doesn’t, though, because adulthood is a curse like that and Kuroo will not let anyone else have the last laugh. He grits his teeth and types winding sentences like staircases, walks around the living room where the vase stands tall and empty when his head fills up with too much noise.

 

Seven o’clock in the evening finds him on the rooftop landing of his tiny apartment building, arms folded over the metal railing and chin propped neatly on top. The sun clings like a lost child to the corners of the violently-purple sky, nothing but a sliver of gleaming red light against the jagged city skyline. Overhead, the moon takes its first steps into the cool embrace of the clouds, rustling with cicada-sounds, car horns.

 

It's a cliche, like a lot of things about his life, but an unintentional one for once. The space up here is nothing to shout about, certainly not enough for any elaborate sky garden plans or anything of the sort. But it's quiet, and empty, and overlooks the south side of Akasaka with its sprawling forest of commercial buildings and residential blocks sprouting like mushrooms among them. It's nice.

 

He hasn't left his apartment all day so he's still in his hoodie and trousers, the university logo emblazoned across the front as faded as the memories it carries. Kuroo holds a hand out against the dying light, covering the sun with his outstretched palm. _It looks too sad_ , he thinks. _Too lonely._

 

And if it’s all too dramatic then sophomore Kuroo would’ve laughed at him, a sharp thing that could cut diamonds, told him to get _his shit together_ and _move on_ and _keep trying_. But he has gotten his shit together, and he’s moved on (too far, almost), and still. Still. Around him the color fades away and his mind flickers in the encroaching darkness, candle-like.

 

_Click._

 

Kuroo jerks out of his dramatic sunset monologue with a start, and turns around slowly.

 

Bokuto stands a few feet away, frozen, hair looking windswept and swan-soft. When Kuroo moves, he does too, abruptly, as if his humanity were only a recent matter of fact, cheeks pinking visibly. He takes a shaky step backwards, the camera in his hands still held up to his chest.

 

“Doing some impromptu shooting?” Kuroo asks after a moment. He’d been looking outwards when the shutter went off, doesn’t know _who_ or _what_ exactly Bokuto had been taking a photo of to be frank, but Bokuto’s eyes, burnt sunshine against the smudge of indigo behind him, speak up, louder than the crows and their funeral songs.

 

Bokuto opens his mouth, closes it, lowers the camera, and opens it again.

 

“It was very beautiful,” he says, honesty lending his voice an unnaturally clear quality, like water bubbling out of a small creek. Kuroo can tell. Kuroo is a master at lying through his teeth, so Kuroo can tell.

 

“What, all this?” He gestures at the city behind him, the neon lights and sounds just beginning to come alive, his smile brittle as bone. He isn't expecting anything, not really.

 

Bokuto relaxes visibly at that, and nods.

 

“All this, too,” he says, “but mainly you.”

 

Where his voice had been hurricane-loud and rough the past few weeks, it comes out softer now. Less like thunder; more like rain.

 

Kuroo feels a smile flit cross his face, but it’s not one he recognizes.

 

See, Kuroo’s gotten very good at smiling over the years, so he has a smile for everything. A smile for the starry-eyed youths and their helium heartbeats; a smile for the unassuming strangers on the same side of the street; a smile for the publishing company and their strange, too-expectant editors. A smile to soothe the sadness of a friend, a smile to hide his own.

 

Kuroo’s gotten very good at smiling over the years, so he should be giving Bokuto a smile like a dream in a plastic bottle, cap screwed on tight to keep the oxygenated hope inside from leaking out.

 

He doesn't.

 

“You're a terrible flirt,” he drawls.

 

Bokuto grins, sharp and bright. “You're terrible at not being attractive.”

 

Kuroo is flattered, but then and again, Kuroo is frequently flattered. By people who have only seen _Smile #1_ to _#5_ , by people he can only disappoint. He knows these things.

 

“—anyway, I hope you don't think I was being too much of a creep,” Bokuto adds when Kuroo falls a little silent, the cosmic intensity of his eyes trickling away with a small sigh. “Like, I don't usually use this camera for taking photos of really attractive people without asking, I _swear_. It's mainly for my job.” As he talks he moves closer, propping his elbows up against the railing next to Kuroo with his back to the open sky. It's an easy posture, comfort oozing from the slant of his shoulders despite the deer-in-the-headlights look he’d been caught with earlier. It's a friendly posture.

 

Kuroo raises an eyebrow. He's halfway between surprise and a revelation. “So, you're a photographer.”

 

“Yup.”

 

By now the sun has long since dipped beneath the horizon, trailing space-dust and the familiar mantle of night in its wake. Bokuto looks different ( _obviously_ , Kuroo’s mind helpfully supplements), again, his features shifting to accommodate for the absence of light, eyes glowing round and owl-like. He's wearing a smile like the start of summer, body inclined just the faintest bit towards Kuroo.

 

And this is the part of the story where the words are supposed to run out, where Kuroo’s supposed to mention the time and his sore neck and then walk away and leave Bokuto alone on the rooftop of their tiny Akasaka apartment building, but Kuroo can’t bring himself to do it. Bokuto’s wearing a smile like the start of summer, and he can’t do it.

 

Instead, he opens his mouth.

 

“What kind of work do you do, if not of the sneakily taking photos of your neighbor sort?”

 

//

 

Kuroo won't let anything start, because Kuroo doesn't want to go anywhere.

 

Kuroo is content with where he is now, with this house and these rooms and these keys. He knows where the monsters are and where to hide to avoid them, and when it thunders outside he can crawl into the cupboard under the kitchen sink and put his hands over his ears. He can close any door he wants to; he can lock up all the rooms with bloodstains on the wall and make everyone forget about them.

 

Kuroo won’t let anything start, because if it starts then it has to end, and he knows, more than anything, what endings do to people. He has watched the life bleed out of a beating heart and then watched that heart beat on for decades afterwards. He has learned the way sadness undoes the clockwork of the soul. It is never a pretty sight, only a cruel one.

 

Kuroo won't let anything start. Not with him, not without him, not because of him, Kuroo won’t open the windows in this house for anyone, Kuroo won’t unlock the door to the attic. If everyone else wants to go around burning things down and then lighting themselves on fire as well, then they can do that. They will do that. Kuroo will sit in the cupboard with child-small elbows pressed against the wooden sides and count to ten.

 

And no one will find him.

 

//

 

Kuroo learns that Bokuto is a freelance photographer who shoots what he wants, when he wants. He can do this because a lot of people want him to shoot things for them. He figures Bokuto must be a very good photographer.

 

It turns out Bokuto also helps out around at his uncle’s flower shop when he's free, because he's on very good terms with this uncle and he gets to learn things about flower language and arrangements. That explains the flowers. Not the intent behind them, but their presence at least.

 

At the end of the night Bokuto asks for his phone and then keys in his number, the smile practically sliding down the side of his face.

 

Maybe the situation isn't quite as hopeless as Kuroo thinks it is.

 

(That's a joke, and a lie. He knows this too.)

 

//

 

Tokyo is known for things like glitter and fairy dust. The massive departmental stores, the bustle of the evening office crowd, the convenience stores sprinkled like a generous helping of salt and pepper throughout the city’s twisting streets. If you asked a tourist what they thought of it, they'd probably say something about the size of the _donki_ store in Shibuya or the sheer fluorescence of Shinjuku’s night scene.

 

Akasaka is known for fewer things. Caught in between straight-laced Nagatacho and permanently-loud Roppongi, it's always been overlooked in favor of other, bolder districts.

 

What Akasaka most definitely is not known for, however, is the generosity in construction of their residential buildings. More specifically, Kuroo has a few things to say on the topic of elevators because the one in his apartment building is shitty and cramped and can barely fit two grown men standing side by side, with maybe half an inch of courtesy space between them. _Fuck elevators_ , he decides, and maybe fuck the existence of his neighbor too now, although he's not sure if he really wants to go through with that thought. This is all too much for him. He's been writing all afternoon. His _fingers_ are _tired_.

 

He’d rather not admit it, but while his job as a struggling writer affords him a more flexible schedule than most, somehow he still manages to bump into Bokuto more and more frequently with each week that steps on his face in passing and then walks away.

 

It's just a little past four p.m. today, and Kuroo steps out into the warmth of the afternoon sun in the hopes of refilling his dwindling coffee reserves, only to find an oddly downcast Bokuto untying his shoelaces on his own doorstep.

 

The moment he sees Kuroo, Bokuto visibly brightens and then jumps up, half undone shoelaces flailing precariously around him. He’s wearing the silver windbreaker again today, the hood thrown back and the zipper stuck halfway up his chest.

 

“Where’re you going?”

 

Kuroo cocks a half-smile in his direction, dangling his keyring idly from his index finger. “Coffee?”

 

“Is that an invitation?”

 

“No, it's coffee,” he says dryly.

 

Bokuto follows him into the elevator anyway, bending over in the tiny space to retie his shoelaces. When he's finished he stands up again, and Kuroo suddenly resents the fact that he's more awake than usual because Bokuto’s shoulders are this close to touching his, and they are very nice shoulders, and he only wants to write about them a little.

 

Just a little, but as Bokuto breathes and the number on the little screen above them flashes slowly, so slowly, Kuroo finds himself acutely aware of the other’s presence. They've both got that gravity-defying hair aesthetic going, but even so Bokuto’s a few centimeters shorter than him. It's a profound new discovery. Kuroo doesn't know how to feel about it.

 

What he does know is how to feel about elevators, and the exact sentiment is _fuck_. He's twenty five and perfectly fine and his neighbor is very, very close. Actually, scratch that— he isn't fine.

 

Over the past few weeks he's made a number of Bokuto-shaped discoveries. Bokuto likes going for runs around the neighborhood at five a.m. in the morning but almost always ends up a handful of stations down the line, wandering the streets of an unfamiliar town. He owns a silver windbreaker which he rarely, if ever, lets go of. He has the lung capacity of a blue whale and the volume to match it and his good mornings are loud enough to wake up the entire apartment block, but he can be quiet too; when Kuroo’s trapped six feet under the crushing weight of empty blue eyes and zombie-walking around the lobby Bokuto is gentle enough to string him up like a kite, pull him along back to his own apartment. Bokuto knows how to sing lullabies.

 

Bokuto breaks the silence then, saving him from the hissy snake-filled pit of his own thoughts.

 

“Y’know, I just came back from a shoot,” he mumbles.

 

“Mmm.”

 

“I took up the job because the concept sounded cool, but…” Bokuto heaves a sigh, slumping sideways until he bumps into Kuroo’s arm.

 

“But?”

 

“Honestly?” He shifts a bit and then looks up at Kuroo. “I think you would've been a better model for it.”

 

“I beg your pardon?” Kuroo asks distantly, the finer cognitive functions of his creative writing degree taking over on autopilot while his mind combusts in the background into a cloud of dust and smoke.

 

Bokuto frowns. “I mean it! Like, the guy they hired wasn't _bad_ or anything, but he was just missing something.

 

Like, that thing you have, whatever it is. He didn't have it.”

 

Kuroo’s heart threatens to pull a chick-lit-stutter far too fast and so before that can happen, he forces out a laugh, light and airy.

 

“I'm not even a model. I don't know shit about posing.”

 

But Bokuto is indignant. “You don't need experience for that kinda thing. You just have to _be_ , and I’ll care of everything else.”

 

“I just have to _be_ , huh?” Kuroo echoes, almost wistful, mostly not. “That sounds nice.”

 

Bokuto nudges him with his very nice looking shoulder. “It is.”

 

He follows Kuroo to the convenience store, too.

 

//

 

Kuroo isn't lonely. He has the house in his heart, which he knows like he knows his siblings’ favorite foods and all the elements on the periodic table. The house in his head has two floors and four rooms, if you don't count the study and the attic, and it's comfortable, even if it's cold.

 

Sometimes people like Yaku or Oikawa or Kenma come in. They never go past the living room with its two-seater sofa and alien white lights, but sometimes they come in, and then it’s a little less cold. Kuroo doesn't have to think too hard about not thinking about sadness. Sometimes it's bearable.

 

He's already twenty-five, anyway. He should be over all of this, and if he isn't then he’ll just sweep it under the carpet so no one else has to deal with his child-fears, he’ll just close all the doors. He’ll lock them nice and tight.

 

It's never warm in this house and in Kuroo’s bones, but for the most part, on most days, it's bearable. That's good enough for him. That's probably all he deserves.

 

//

 

If there's one thing in the world Kuroo is grateful for, it's his ridiculous immune system. He says ridiculous, because he falls sick approximately twice a year, but when he _does_ fall sick it's the sort of sick that leaves him hanging so far off the cliff of death he’s convinced every time that he's _actually_ going to die.

 

And as August rolls in so does his annual visit from hell, taking the form of a vicious flu-cold-whatever-the-fuck super upsized combo that leaves him coughing up half his internal organs while a mountain of crumpled tissues steadily grows beside him.

 

He calls his editor to say he's dying (“You're not,” Kenma replies with indifference, even as Kuroo lets out a series of pathetic sniffles from the other end of the line. He is excused, anyway.), refuses to take any medicine despite the fact that he really probably should, and promptly spends the rest of the day in bed with two pairs of socks and a pile of blankets, cursing everything and everyone he can think of.

 

As night falls, he tries to sleep. He tries very hard. He counts sheep and then counts prime numbers when that fails, but there's a cough perpetually stuck in his throat and his nose is blocked like a sink plug and his head feels like it's splitting in half. Predictably, he fails again.

 

Eventually his resolve breaks, and he goes shuffling out of his room in search of medicine.

 

There is none. No medicine. There is no medicine.

 

As in: his medicine cabinet has two Panadol tablets a month past their expiry date, and some scraps of crumpled aluminium foil, and then nothing. Nothing.

 

Kuroo Tetsurou has been forsaken by god.

 

What he really wants to do, as eleven p.m. comes and goes, is to get knocked out by some inter-dimensional force and then lie somewhere in a pleasant coma for maybe a week so he doesn't have to deal with the pain of being alive. But he doesn't know if he’ll ever wake up after that, and while isolation is the name of the game when you are Kuroo Tetsurou, he doesn't really feel like dying just yet.

 

So he pulls an extra sweater over the one he's already wearing, grabs his keys, and ventures out of his apartment.

 

Everything is fine until he gets out, because Kuroo’s sense of balance chooses this very moment at which to completely fail him. The step he means to take on even ground ends up being not on even ground. As he pitches forward, it occurs to him that there is a ledge outside his door, that he had forgotten about it, and that he is an idiot.

 

Then he's crashing into the wall and seeing stars and other bright, distracting things, and the next thing he knows he's on his back on the narrow hallway outside his apartment and like _this close_ to kissing the ceiling. This close.

 

Kuroo laughs and then lets his eyes snap shut, the headache still pounding through his head.

 

The sound of further chaos shakes him from his pain-induced reverie. Reluctantly, he opens his eyes. Through the haze of his fever Kuroo makes out golden eyes, white-and-gray hair.

 

It takes him a second to recognize Bokuto even as he's peering down at him with a worried expression, the clockwork in his brain delayed by the bacterial onslaught— it's his hair, Kuroo realizes. Where it's usually gelled up into very prominent spikes, right now it's actually following the laws of gravity for once. Bokuto’s hair looks more like, well, hair, when he doesn't assault it with hair products; it falls haphazardly over his forehead, soft and curly and the ends still a little wet, damp with water droplets.

 

“You look like shit, man,” Bokuto informs him helpfully, his voice carrying a trace of well-concealed concern.

 

“I _feel_ like shit,” Kuroo mumbles, as Bokuto squats down and wraps a steady arm around his shoulders. The contact is nice. Bokuto is nice. Bokuto is also hot, in both the literal and figurative sense. Kuroo doesn't know if he can really deal with that in his current state of mind.

 

“What were you doing out here then?” Bokuto asks, faintly teasing. And then: “Keys, buddy, we need your keys.”

 

“...don't think I locked the door. I was out of cold medicine.”

 

Bokuto laughs. “But you were planning on going out like this?”

 

“I—” Kuroo sneezes weakly— “‘s not like I had anyone to get help from.”

 

Bokuto stiffens for a split-second; Kuroo feigns ignorance.

 

They've entered the living room now, and with Kuroo’s instruction Bokuto steers him, very gently, into his bedroom. Everything is exactly as he'd left it earlier, the blankets strewn everywhere like candy wrappers, his empty mug on his desk. Bokuto sets Kuroo down like a rag doll on the bed.

 

“I feel like shit,” Kuroo says again when he's securely tucked back into his blanket cocoon. He had been too tired to protest Bokuto’s help, too sick to give a fuck about the fact of his very sweet and very hot neighbor traipsing around in his apartment.

 

“Yeah, well,” Bokuto holds up the thermometer. “This thing says thirty-eight point five, so if you _didn't_ feel like shit then there'd be something even more wrong, I think.” Kuroo isn't paying attention to all the annoying number stuff. He's too busy watching Bokuto sweep the hair out of his eyes. _Swan hair,_ Kuroo thinks. Starry, starry swan hair.

 

After that Bokuto disappears for a while (five minutes? Ten? Fifteen? Kuroo’s not really sure, can't tell with the way the world swims pleasantly around him as if everything has been buoyed up ten feet in the air by a bouquet of helium balloons.) and then returns with the appropriate pills and tablets, which he makes sure Kuroo takes, along with a glass of water.

 

“You really gotta take better care of yourself, Kuroo,” Bokuto’s saying, and he's doing that thing again, the one where he lowers his voice to a pleasant rumbling low and all his words come out softer than usual, rounder around the edges. It's an unfairly pleasant thing. Kuroo thinks he could get used to this, Bokuto when he's shouting from tiny rooftops and Bokuto when he's less loud, too. Kuroo could definitely get used to this.

 

He's ready to open his mouth and serenade Bokuto with gibberish about deadlines and cheesy romcoms, but Bokuto’s standing up in Kuroo’s room and switching off the lights so only the soft glow of his digital clock remains. He looks like he’s going to leave.

 

If he leaves now, Kuroo will be all alone in his small, mostly-comfortable, very empty apartment. It's not like he isn't used to it, not like he hasn't spent the last few years drifting alone at sea with only his manuscripts and canned coffee for company, but—

 

He reaches out from the folds of his blankets, latches his fingers onto Bokuto’s shirt, and _pulls_.

 

Bokuto stares at him.

 

“What's wrong?”

 

Kuroo dimly remembers that he's not supposed to be making any _forthcoming movements_ , let alone to his next-door neighbor, but his fever-addled mind observes the fact that he's already done it and gives up on trying to rectify the situation. So he wasn't thinking. He's tired. Whatever.

 

He blinks up at Bokuto and his pretty, moon-gold eyes.

 

“Nothing,” he murmurs.

 

“But, uh, your hand,” Bokuto says slowly, closing his own fingers lightly around Kuroo’s grip. Is he blushing, or is Kuroo just hallucinating? Kuroo is probably hallucinating. It's too dark to tell anyway, really. Shut the fuck up, Kuroo. You're not a kid anymore.

 

“Your hand. It's cold.”

 

Now that's a concept even Kuroo can comprehend right now. He is indeed very cold, even under all the blankets and sweaters and three pairs of socks.

 

“I’m cold,” he agrees, cheerful to the point of annoyance. “And sick, and kinda lonely, and I feel like shit.

 

So stay.”

 

Bokuto’s gaze flickers from the light-flooded doorway back to Kuroo’s hand, still held safely in his own. He pauses almost unnoticeably, then seems to arrive at a decision of some sort.

 

“Sure.”

 

Now this, Kuroo was not expecting. But Bokuto doesn't give him time to react, just sits down on the floor beside him and rests his elbows on the side of the bed.

 

“Is there anything I can do for you?” He can just about pick out the curve of Bokuto’s lips in the darkness, a sliver of a smile shining like stardust. The absence of light is comforting, soothing like a salve.

 

“Y’know, before my— when I was a kid and I got sick I could never fall asleep by myself. It sucked. So my mom’d always stay beside me and tell me stories until I drifted off, or something,” Kuroo says, half to Bokuto, half to himself, his voice sounding like a shout from far, far away. Half here, half there. Half delirious, half awake.

 

“I dunno why, but it always worked. After— afterwards, she stopped doing it, but I always wished she'd come back someday. Hold my hand and talk about unicorns and superheroes and all that shit again. Childhood nostalgia, yeah?” Kuroo laughs.

 

“I could tell you a story,” Bokuto speaks up into the scatter of quiet that follows.

 

Kuroo turns onto his side to properly regard his neighbor.

 

“You could?”

 

“If you want me to.”

 

Kuroo nods, the motion small enough to be lost against the backdrop of night.

 

“Okay.”

 

Bokuto takes a deep breath, and then, in a small whisper, launches into a story about volleyballs and points that stack up like the bricks of a tower and boys with big, bruised hearts. It’s a teenager’s story, larger than life in that way that the young always manage to be. It’s a love story.

 

Against all surmountable odds, Kuroo sleeps soundly that night.

 

//

 

In the morning, there’s a mug of water with a cap on top and Panadol that isn’t a month past its expiry date, and a hastily-scribbled note on his bedside table, something about car engine snoring and sleep-talk and getting enough rest, _you better do it I live next door I can make you._

 

Two days later, Oikawa calls, so Kuroo asks, very innocently, if he really does make weird and offensive sounds in his sleep. There's a pause on the other end, contemplative and intense in the way that Oikawa gets when he's gearing up to write a particularly bothersome paper or attempting telepathic communication with his pet lobster (again).

 

“Sort of, yeah, I think. Nothing _too_ bad though,” comes the floaty response. “But that was when you were a shit-faced college student, I don't know about _other circumstances._

 

Anyway, what's this about, hm? Cat finally drag someone—”

 

He hangs up.

 

//

 

This is how it is with Kuroo: letting people in is hard.

 

By the time his limbs are long enough to fit into the sleeves and pant-legs of his high school uniform, he has perfected the art of orbiting. Of being distant but close enough to brush up against, of being both flashy and very far away.

 

Only it's not really an art, because it's not very beautiful. Kuroo Tetsurou has a smile like the gleaming edge of a knife and everyone is in love. They think it's romantic.

 

The truth is, Kuroo learns to ease himself into the spaces other people create so he doesn't have to let anyone into his own. If he only takes what they'll give then no one will think to ask anything of him. It's a sly thing, this mechanism for staying suspended, disconnected. It's a cruel thing.

 

Throughout the years, as high school blazers give way to the free-falling of college _everything_ and then the jumbled routine of adult life, people come up against the gravitational pull that surrounds him and try to press past it.

 

_You're so sweet, why won't you let me take you home. You have the wildest hairdo. Your voice sounds like twilight._

 

Home is only one place to Kuroo, and he hates it. Kuroo is only a distant memory. He hates him too.

 

These people appear like bad omens. They always ask for too much and Kuroo always stops short of giving anything meaningful away. Kuroo can do champagne laughter and courtesy; Kuroo can do non-committal flirtation; Kuroo can do a lot of things.

 

But Kuroo cannot do this. Because it's not really an art, what he does— it's not really art, so he can't call it love.

 

//

 

Kuroo visits the flower shop Bokuto mentioned the last time purely to express his gratitude for the Dramatic Fever Incident.

 

That’s what he tells himself, anyway, as he scrolls through three pages’ worth of _Petit Bijou_ Google search results in search of a certain store that isn’t located a billion miles away, in Kyoto or Nara or something. He finds the right one eventually, confirms it with the photo of a vaguely familiar looking man sporting a hot pink apron and a grin that threatens to split his face in half.

 

He decides to make the trip down on a Sunday, uncharacteristically early just because he’d woken up before eleven o’clock for once. Outside, the sky is a block of solid granite, littered with darker and lighter grays here and there. Kuroo hums as he walks.

 

_Petit Bijou_ (the Akasaka-Mitsuke branch) is a quaint little thing like you'd find inside a storybook, half a fairytale tucked snugly between a ramen store and a residential block. A small but very wild assortment of potted plants both surrounds and leads up to the doorway. Further behind the glass, the soothing warmth of yellow lights beckons him in like an old friend.

 

Shoving his phone into the pocket of his jeans, Kuroo pushes the door open.

 

So, two things:

 

First, the row of porcelain cat figures on a fixture attached to the wall to the far right. Why there are so many delicate, dangerous-looking porcelain cat figures in a flower shop is completely lost on Kuroo; their meticulously-well painted faces stare back at him, noses seemingly on the verge of twitching to life. He's both alarmed and baffled.

 

Second, Bokuto, standing in the middle of the aisle, armed with floral snips in one hand while the other one is caught in the middle of strangling the stem of a now very distressed looking lavender plant. Bokuto, wearing that same hot pink apron his uncle had on in his website profile. Bokuto, hot pink cheeks and all.

 

He’s not wearing his silver windbreaker today, which makes sense, given he’s at work. Kuroo is a little surprised nonetheless.

 

“G-good evening!” He manages to choke out, sounding half excited and half ready-to-fall-out-the-closest-window nervous.

 

Kuroo looks pointedly at his watch. “Good morning.” He offers a crooked grin.

 

“Ah— aha, yes.” Bokuto scratches the back of his head awkwardly, releasing his death-grip on the lavender stalk in the process. “Uh,” he says with eloquence. “What can I do for you?”

 

_I am here to express my gratitude_ , Kuroo reminds himself virtuously.

 

“Since I was free today, I figured I'd drop by and buy something as thanks for the other day,” he replies with a shrug, nonchalant. “Y’know, when I was sick and you saved me from a chill night out in the hallway.”

 

Bokuto grows taller by like three whole inches. Kuroo swears it. He cracks a smile that's bright as an egg yolk and twice as shiny, then heads deeper into the store, waving Kuroo in with one hand.

 

“Do you have anything in mind?”

 

Kuroo traces the lively jumble of color with one eye, the edge of Bokuto’s smile with the other.

 

“I don’t know shit about flowers, so I’ll trust you.”

 

//

 

While Bokuto rings up his chrysanthemums (again, like Saturday, like June) behind the register, Kuroo wanders around the store a bit more. The relatively small storefront of _Petit Bijou_ had betrayed its depth; the spacious interior combined with the sheer volume of flowers lining every nook and cranny makes for quite a gorgeous sight. If Kuroo were feeling generous, he'd call this place beautiful.

 

As it is, Kuroo is feeling very generous today.

 

“This place is pretty great,” he muses.

 

“Thanks! My uncle’s had it since forever. I've been hanging out here since I was a kid, so I got to help with remodeling and renovations and stuff along the way too.”

 

“Like the cats, you mean?”

 

Kuroo can hear the fondness in Bokuto’s voice when he answers, “Yeah, like the cats.”

 

“Cute stuff. Are they for sale?”

 

“Nah, we just keep them around ‘cos customers say they like ‘em.”

 

“I can imagine.” Kuroo takes his freshly-wrapped flowers from Bokuto, passes him his money in exchange.

 

“So, like—”

 

He looks up.

 

Bokuto’s fidgeting with his hands, trailing his fingers along the countertop like the keys of a piano. His ears look like they’re burning.

 

“Would you like to get lunch together, or something?”

 

There's a look in his eyes like the sky right before the sun appears at the lowest levels of the city skyline. There's a look in his eyes. It's a lot like hope.

 

But right now Bokuto’s hope looks too much like the nightmares Kuroo still has at night, curled up in bed, facing the wall with his skin stretched as taut as fishing line. Twenty-five and drowning in daydreams and reading too much into everything, Kuroo hears _lunch_ and sees the kind of tragedy that he's carried with him his whole life.

 

Suddenly, his mouth feels dry. His stomach twists unpleasantly, an unkind, halloweenish sensation passing through him like a cold front, freezing him from the bottom up. His hands begin to tremble.

 

Kuroo feels sick.

 

_Would you like to get lunch together, or something?_

 

_I—_

 

He wants it, and he wants it, so he can't have it. If he takes it then he will be punished for being a greedy person. He knows this. He’s seen the bad ending unfold before.

 

He swallows, and it feels like a thousand-and-one needles stuttering down the singed column his throat, but he can't stop his hands from shaking and now it feels like the entire flower shop is falling apart at the seams, unraveling like the frayed ends of an old sweater. Disappearing into nothingness.

 

“I’m sorry, I can’t—” he breathes, the words climbing out of his mouth like powder-winged moths.

 

And then Kuroo turns and runs and runs, away from Bokuto and his hot pink apron and pretty pink cheeks, away from the broken-glass landscape of horror.

 

The flowers lie, forgotten, on the countertop.

 

//

 

When Kuroo is twelve, his father leaves and doesn’t come back.

 

Then his mother leaves, and most of her comes back.

 

Most of her comes back. The bits of her that love Kuroo and his two younger siblings do not come back. Her heart does not come back.

 

So Kuroo, already cheeky and bright and unnaturally sharp, learns to be sharper. He stops looking for new hiding spots and old scarves in the attic and starts memorizing the layout of the kitchen, the buttons on the laundry machine, the best way to slice onions without getting ugly stains all over the cutting board.

 

And his mother is there through it all, sitting at the kitchen table or leaning against a wall in the hallway or curled up quietly on the two-seater sofa in the living room. There, but not really. Here, but not really. Soft and raw and blurry around the edges, like a five year old’s stubby crayon drawing, or soft-boiled eggs with watery yolks.

 

When Kuroo looks at her he sees the toys gathering dust at the furthest corner of his closet. When Kuroo looks at her eyes he sees his father.

 

For the rest of the years he spends in the Kuroo household, trapped between duty and destruction like a painted marionette, his father does not go away.

 

His mother is here, but not here. His father is not here, but here. There are ghosts in the study no one goes into anymore but his siblings cannot know about them so he shares his nightmares with the wall, the same one his mother likes to lean against with her blue hands and blue eyes.

 

So this is how Kuroo grows up, in a big, big house with big, big rooms, carrying a big, big sadness in his heart like a monster. Even long after he leaves for college and then the rippling horizon of the outside world, the house stays with him. His mother stays with him, the ghost of her husband living in her dead-person eyes.

 

Kuroo never forgets, but he never really leaves either.

 

He just closes all the doors.

 

//

 

Kuroo played a lot of games as a kid. There were the flashy desktop ones that came out later filled to bursting with technicolor, like _Blues Clues_ and _Putt-Putt_ , but before that there was this one game on a little plastic console with a black-and-white screen, weighing less than an apple. It was a simple game— all you had to do was avoid being eaten by the snake. It was a simple game. Kuroo was very good at it.

 

In fact, Kuroo’s always been very good at avoiding things in general. Half of it can be attributed to necessity; as for the other half he figures he was simply born with the kind of intuition that got him away from the searching eyes of worried suspicious teachers, curious classmates, curious hands. It’s always worked in his favor. He won’t complain.

 

More than anything, he is grateful for his in-built Danger Detector because it's been two weeks since he burned the first bridge he's built in approximately three years, and his heart hurts like a bruise. The distinct lack of Bokuto around him means the bruise stings just a little less. It's not recovering, by any means. It's just not getting any worse.

 

Stagnation. That's what Kuroo would call it. Like being stuck in the stagnant water that collects in the shallow dishes they place flower pots inside of, gathering dirt and grime and the offspring of wayward mosquitos.

 

Stagnation. That's one word for this, all this, like being trapped in the sliver of space between two train carriages, darkness all around you and two neat squares of light on each side. Like the layover between two long, long flights, slumped over in some empty corner of the airport with a half-empty bottle of mineral water held loosely in your hands.

 

He's tired, frankly speaking, of avoiding Bokuto, because this shit isn't easy, not when the physical manifestation of the highlight _and_ lowlight of the last three months lives right next door. That's nothing new in itself— Kuroo has been tired since he pulled all-nighters like three-in-a-row jackpots to get into university when he was still bright-eyed and bristling. The problem lies elsewhere.

 

See, when Kuroo gets sufficiently drunk off his ass and lets himself think about the events of Two Weeks Ago, all the pent-up stuff drifts back into his metaphorical line of sight. If his heart is a closet then he's been trying to stuff everything _Bokuto-related_ inside of it the way you'd try to squeeze all your childhood skeletons into the same damn closet, slamming the door and then leaning all your body weight against it until it clicks shut. If his heart is a closet then alcohol is the catalyst for the broken dam, the re-entrance of all these dusty, hidden things.

 

There are a lot of dusty things, Kuroo thinks as he steps inside the _Family Mart_ across the street, the familiar jingle echoing jovially after him. Today it sounds dead. It’s a relatable sentiment; so is he.

 

When Kuroo lets himself think about the events of Two Weeks Ago he gets this odd kind of feeling, as if a vacuum cleaner’s gone in and sucked all the air out of his lungs. It’s not very pleasant. It reminds him of trying to walk around in a house with a big purple elephant staring at him no matter which room he goes to, these huge looking-glass eyes boring into the back of his neck with frightening intensity, so it’s not very pleasant.

 

He grabs a carton of milk from the cold drinks section and frowns at it. The expiry date’s barely three days away. Damn it all.

 

Anyway, it’s not like he’s really done anything wrong, per se. Someone asked him out on what was most likely intended to be a date so he high-tailed it out of there without the slightest explanation.

 

Okay, maybe he could have been a little more tactful. More in control. Whatever.

 

But there’s more to this than just a chronic fear of lunchtime hours. As Kuroo the writer he knows how easily your past can screw you over, how fast the words come flying when he's waxing lyrical about stupid shit like shooting stars and faraway planets; as Kuroo the human being he has experienced it all firsthand.

 

The purple elephant’s always been there. He's just gotten very good at ignoring it. And now Bokuto is standing somewhere near the front door, one foot still in the grassy yard outside, and he’s got another fucking elephant with him. It's a perfectly good elephant but it reminds Kuroo of the one he's been ignoring. It reminds Kuroo of the cupboard under the kitchen sink.

 

This isn't the kind of house you can escape from. That's the problem.

 

Kuroo squints at the candy rack for a minute, grabs a pack of lemon-flavored gummies.

 

One step at a time. He’ll get out of this, or he won't. It's all right if he doesn't. Kuroo is used to radio silence.

 

He's this close to internal-conflict-resolution-attempt-number-fifteen and like three meters away from the cashier, who is leaning against the counter looking very vogue, by which he means very zombie-like, when the stupid jingle goes off again.

 

Some Family Marts are small. Some Family Marts are big enough to function effectively as child-sized supermarkets. Some Family Marts are small.

 

This Family Mart is small.

 

What that means is that Kuroo, milk carton and lemon gummies tucked under one elbow and foot stuck out in the aisle where the zombie cashier stands, immediately sees Bokuto as he walks inside. What that means is that Kuroo sees Bokuto. What that means is: Bokuto.

 

Luckily, Bokuto doesn't see him, but as he shuffles down the snack aisle Kuroo's Danger Detector starts ringing like a police siren in his head. The snack aisle is right next to the drinks aisle, which Kuroo is near the end of. Which means Bokuto will very likely see him if he heads for the cashier right now.

 

Scratch that— Bokuto didn't bring an elephant to Kuroo’s doorstep, he _is_ the elephant. Bright and eye-catching and irrefutably present, alive, vibrant in the _here and now_ kind of way that has long since slipped from Kuroo’s grasp. Even as he presses forward cautiously into the snack aisle as Bokuto exits it, Kuroo’s eyes snag on the ocean-sway of his white and gray hair.

 

He's terrified of being seen but shit, _he_ wants to see Bokuto.

 

The thought continues haunting Kuroo like a spectral manifestation of his guilt as he speed-walks back to the cashier when Bokuto is further away, declines the plastic bag, grabs his change and milk carton and gummies, and darts out of the store.

 

Kuroo was athletic once, but times have changed. He’s relieved to see the red man blinking back at him from across the street; it lets him catch his breath, and his heart, too, because that seems to have acquired a delayed response time along with everything else.

 

And then the blasted jingle goes off _again_ , and Kuroo hates how close he is because he hears it and hears Bokuto’s fleeting _thank you_ to the zombie cashier even though no one thanks _konbini_ cashiers in Tokyo, and before he can turn away fully he catches sight of half the curve of a shoulder.

 

He does turn away afterwards, anyway. Curses the tiny red man and every single car that cruises by on the road between him and salvation even as the sound of footsteps draws closer, closer, and then stops.

 

A distance away, Bokuto watches him. Kuroo is not watching him, but somehow he knows this anyway, can feel those purple-elephant eyes boring into the back of his neck.

 

A distance away, Bokuto watches him. A column of silence ripples between them, gray light percolating through the tension suspended in mid-air like marionette strings.

 

And then it starts to rain.

 

It's nothing monumental at first— a slight drizzle, droplets clinging to his eyelashes and the still-cold packaging of his carton of milk. In the splinter of time it takes Kuroo to release the shaky breath he'd been holding since Bokuto stopped beside him, it gives out into a proper shower.

 

But Kuroo has an umbrella. Kuroo is always prepared, so he has an umbrella. He pulls it out, peels off the Velcro, lets it spring open over his head.

 

Bokuto does not have an umbrella. The fact makes itself apparent to Kuroo when he quietly shifts his gaze to his left, noting with a disproportionately heavy jolt that Bokuto’s gravity-defying hair is beginning to wilt.

 

Something in him wilts at that too, because Bokuto’s still looking at him, looking at Kuroo as he looks at Bokuto through rain-goggles. The rain-goggles are a metaphor for his internal conflict and the distance he's forced out of their newfound revelation. The distance is a metaphor for fear.

 

Oh, how Kuroo fears everything. Twenty-five and still weak and trembling like he was at ten, twelve, sixteen. Kuroo fears everything.

 

So despite the undercurrent of hurt in Bokuto’s eyes, despite the purple-elephant sadness all around him, Kuroo tucks his milk carton closer to his chest and steps out onto the zebra-crossing.

 

The green man blinks innocently back at him, reassuring him of these brief realities: he will not get hit by a car and die today. He has left Bokuto on the street in the rain to turn wet and sad and lonely. He will not die today.

 

The gods can give him this much, at least.

 

//

 

This is how it is with Kuroo: letting people in is hard.

 

Reaching out is easy. Stepping out of his own skin and putting on sleek suits and silk smiles is easy. Letting people in is not.

 

It has never been, not really, like how a teenager hesitates to let his best friend see the clutter of clothes on his bedroom floor. The only difference is Kuroo’s bedroom floor isn't covered in clothes; the only difference is that here the clutter is a metaphor for all the stupid things he can't let go of, that won't let go of him.

 

(Child-Kuroo stands in the blue room with the blue walls and the blue ceiling, eyes empty. Always empty.)

 

This is how it is with Kuroo: he doesn't know how to do it. The whole business of opening up, of allowing, of _letting_.

 

He’s always been what the adults called smart and his dad (when he was still around) called unlucky; he has years of straight A’s and a bachelor’s degree in English and some more, the city of Tokyo memorized like a map under his steady hands. He's always been brilliant, but only in the ways the world needed him to be.

 

No one had ever placed a premium on _letting people in_. Not in this house.

 

But in this narrow apartment complex on the quieter side of Akasaka, there are other things to worry about.

 

Kuroo’s been out all day at a meeting with Kenma over coffee and tea and discreet smartphone games, and it took them a while (five hours), but they've finally settled something. Now Kuroo has a deadline for the next segment of his story, and Kenma has a new game. They're adults. They're good at this.

 

He's expecting a couple of things when he gets back, like the empty lobby because it's Tuesday afternoon, and the empty elevator, and the empty hallway. What he isn’t expecting is this.

 

Placed neatly near the middle of the raised ledge, a single chrysanthemum.

 

Kuroo picks it up gingerly, a slender promise held between his thumb and forefinger. Unfolds the creased paper tied with ribbon to the base of the stem. Holds it up to the light.

 

In handwriting that’s careful almost to the point of looking pained, neat letters tottering unevenly across the line:

 

_I’d like to do a photoshoot— would you be my model?_

 

_p.s. you forgot these._

 

Kuroo wants it, and he wants it, so he can't have it. He wants it, so he has to leave it. Even though he wants it. Even though his heart lurches like a boat lost at sea, tossed from skylights to drowning depths.

 

Still, he puts the chrysanthemum in the tall vase on the dining table, and fills it up with water.

 

//

 

Bokuto Koutarou moves into the apartment unit next door on a Saturday. He brings boxes and boxes of photographs, stacked up like the layers of a wedding cake. He drops one.

 

Kuroo picks it up, face-down, and then forgets all about it.

 

And the forgetting continues for the next three, four months, as spring dovetails reluctantly into the throes of summer and the light brands itself into his skin like a permanent fixture of heat. The forgetting goes on for a while as the photographer becomes larger than his photographs and the cadence of his voice expands like a hot-air-balloon across Kuroo’s field of vision. Kuroo knows, because Kuroo did this himself, looked up Bokuto Koutarou and scrolled through his online portfolio with something like reverence, something like awe. Kuroo knew where his feet were going but chose to look up at the sky anyway.

 

The letter on his doorstep resurfaces the memory of the photograph. Kuroo thinks of this on the suspension bridge between dreams and lucidity one morning, falls out of his blankets so he can rummage around in the pile of papers on his desk, and then the pile of papers under that pile, and then the pile of crumpled receipts and smudged sheets that lies underneath even that.

 

Eventually, he finds it in the second drawer under that paper-flooded desk, suffocating between a paperweight shaped like a cat and a faded birthday letter from a university friend. Eventually, he finds it again. All it takes is: faith, and memory, and a little luck.

 

Falling back into his chair, Kuroo studies the back of the photograph. The paper feels firm and steady in his hands, thick like the weak crinkle of standard printer-fare is not. Behind that— where the image is— it is glossy, smooth to the touch. Kuroo runs his hands along the date sharpied into a corner of the clean white space. _January 23rd, 2016._

 

After four months of forgetting, Kuroo finally remembers. It's a shot of a single, towering parabolic dish, rust-red and bleeding into the tangle of sepia-colored weeds that rushes up to meet its crumbling foundations with a visceral hunger. Behind the intricate framework of the metal giant, the dying sun rages. Behind the dying sun and its riotous anger, the sky hesitates on the brink of a purple revelation.

 

The place looks, feels, and therefore must be abandoned. Even through the photograph he can smell the emptiness, the cigarette smoke laughter, and if he holds it up to his eyes and squints he can make out the rooftops of faraway buildings. It’s the sort of place children would sneak into. Call it writer’s instinct, but Kuroo knows there should be something unsettling about the image. Call it writer’s instinct, but the color of the sky should be something terrifying.

 

Instead, it’s sad.

 

Kuroo leans back into the threadbare gray backing of his chair. Pauses.

 

Maybe sad isn’t the right word, per se— it’s more of a kind of loneliness, a quiet yearning in the way the mouth of the parabolic dish looks ready to scoop the whole sky into its arms. In the somber twilight, the weeds look a little like outstretched hands.

 

And Kuroo’s seen the impressive array of Bokuto’s work, seen the glamorous, gold-dusted models and the sprawling deserts and the city skylines, so he shouldn’t be surprised, really, but he is. There’s something different about this shot, something about the mooning metal monster hunched over in pain; Bokuto’s shot some of the most intimate scenes Kuroo’s seen in his life, but there is a raw vulnerability here that surpasses the shine of smooth skin, parted lips, everything else in-between. This is an exposure of the soul.

 

And it hurts to look at in the most terrible, familiar way. It hurts.

 

//

 

Tonight, Kenma is not Kuroo’s editor. They’re at the very back of a neighborhood _Gusto,_ sitting with their knees jumbled together in a small booth that’s seen better days. Kuroo fiddles with the laminated plastic menu absentmindedly and Kenma tries to pretend he doesn’t exist. Further out, where the gummy worm-yellow lights can reach, students and office workers and old ladies in their respective old lady flocks dance around the narrow space to the tune of Friday night insanity. After the briefest moment of contemplation known to mankind, Kenma prods at the buzzer and a waiter picks his way through the mess to their table.

 

They order pizza, cheese steak, fries. The usual.

 

As the waiter returns to the fray, Kuroo turns back to Kenma, who has turned to face the wall against the booth. _Nope, I am not feeling it_ , his posture says, from the faint knit of his brows to the hunch of his shoulders.

 

While normally Kuroo would be inclined to leave him alone with his phone and his burgeoning quarter-life crisis, tonight Kenma is not Kuroo’s editor, and that makes all the difference.  
It’s all cool, except when Kuroo’s parfait arrives he kind of just frowns really intensely at it until the little chunk of brownie on top falls off and lands on the table with a sad _plop_.

 

Kuroo stares at the brownie. Kenma stares at Kuroo, who stares at the brownie until he is obligated to look back up at his friend.

 

He’d really rather not, but he does anyway. It’s Kenma, after all.

 

“Pathetic,” is the first word of the night, and it lingers like an accusation between them in their stupid cramped _Gusto_ booth. Kuroo ducks his head in shame, but returns with a cheeky grin. He picks up the brownie piece and stuffs it in his mouth. Kenma just sighs.

 

“Pathetic,” Kenma repeats after he’s spent ten seconds chewing on a fry. “If you’re not going to eat your parfait, then I will.” He pauses, brain-magic happening somewhere behind those still-bleached bangs. “And if you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I won’t make you.”

 

Kuroo digs his spoon so enthusiastically into the parfait he hears the clink of metal against glass. He shovels the whole thing into his mouth.

 

“Yes, well,” he begins, and then decides not to continue.

 

Kenma looks at him blankly. Kuroo changes his mind.

 

“Remember the neighbor I told you about? A while back, the guy with the flowers and the monochrome hair and everything.”

 

“Mm.”

 

“Remember the bit when I fucked up and ran away from his uncle’s flower shop?”

 

“Mmm.”

 

“Yeah, well, he returned the flowers from that day. And he asked me to help him out with a shoot.”

 

When Kuroo finally shifts his gaze away from his parfait, Kenma is radiating a very specific, very pointed _what-the-fuck-kind-of-grown-ass-adult-does-cheesy-shit-like-that-in-real-life_ energy. He won’t vocalize the thought, because it’d be too much effort for him, but Kuroo knows that’s what he’s thinking. Fourteen years of feudal tactics and blanket-hogging sleepovers can do that to you, make you telepathic. Like an alien.

 

After a moment the incredulity fades away and is replaced with quiet curiosity. Kenma methodically dices up his fries, pushing the butter knife into the mush with a kind of listless determination. The question hangs between them, unspoken.

 

“I don’t know,” Kuroo finally says, the vulnerability in his voice surprising himself.

 

“I don’t either,” Kenma mutters.

 

Kuroo runs a hand through his hair, the motion jerky and unnatural, like a hiccup. “He’s— he’s really fucking nice to me, even though I’m a pretentious dick, and his laugh, and his hair, it’s like swan feathers, and—

 

—I really like him, but all this liking and loving shit, it doesn’t work out. Not with me.”

 

Kenma blows bubbles into his Sprite, stares at them with immense fascination.

 

“That’s a one-sided argument,” he comments mildly.

 

Kuroo pouts, in spite of everything. “So what.”

 

“So it’s not fair. For either of you.” Kenma sighs at his empty plate. “Why not just, like, tell him something, and then see how he takes it. Something. Anything.”

 

If it had been anyone else, sitting in a stuffy _Gusto_ at nine on a Friday night with their knees bumping erratically into his every other minute, Kuroo would have walked out. Kuroo, like Kenma, is very good at having his way with things when he wants to.

 

If it had been anyone else, Kuroo would’ve shut his brain off and begun to count the cracks in the ceiling. But Kenma is Kenma. Kenma has walked past the living room and glimpsed the second floor from the first step of the winding staircase. Kenma knows about the study— not what it looks like, not which parts of it have the worst handprints and crayon-scribbles, but about the existence of it.

 

_Tell him something._

 

His chest constricts instinctively at the thought, a spasm of muscle-memory. Of fear. But Kuroo keeps thinking about it, and keeps thinking about it, and lets the thought stay.

 

Because tonight Kenma is not his editor, but his friend. And Kenma the friend is telepathic, too, like an alien.

 

Fourteen years is a long time to know someone.

 

He cracks a barely-there smile at Kuroo from across the table, the yellow lights flashing in his eyes.

 

//

 

“You could’ve just texted, y’know,” Kuroo says a few days later, his voice cutting through the chasm of silence between them.

 

Bokuto looks at him like he’s just walked out of a story. Stumbles backwards, back hitting the wall with a low thud, then tentatively moves forward again. Inhales once, twice, lungs quivering with the visible effort of holding himself together.

 

“Is that a no?”

 

Kuroo laughs, just a little, a string of bubbles emerging from a flute of champagne. He rolls his shoulders, cocks his head to one side. “No? It’s a yes. I'll model for you.”

 

“A yes.”

 

“Yes.”

 

More silence, but lighter. A held breath of disbelief. A whisper:

 

“ _Holy shit.”_

 

Bokuto’s face is like the sunrise. Kuroo has to look away.

 

//

 

He doesn’t agree because he wants something from Bokuto, specifically. Rather, there is a collection of reasons, and ‘wanting something from Bokuto’ is one of them.

 

The laws of the universe dictate that Kuroo will never have the things that he wants. This is how he learned to smile like a salve, to wear his confidence lopsided so no one noticed the falsity underneath. This is how he learned to squirrel away the parts of himself that didn't fit in as nicely with the other, shinier parts.

 

Maybe Bokuto exists outside of the laws of the universe. Kuroo goes to sleep thinking of chrysanthemums and wakes up with egg-yolk gold trapped between his teeth.

 

He doesn’t agree just because he wants something from Bokuto. There would be no point to this otherwise— Kuroo still refuses to, and never will, open the door to the study. It's still a mess up there. He's still a mess.

 

But there is a _but_ to this sentence, a quiet at the end of the screaming waterfall, a kind of forgiveness. The _but_ is a handful of inches shorter than Kuroo and his hurricane head. The _but_ wears really big silver windbreakers that should be obnoxious but fail to live up to the glimmer of sun in his eyes. The _but_ has hair like swan feathers, which is to say that it is the most bizarre blend of white-and-gray, which is to say that if Kuroo reached out and touched it (and he wants to, he does) it would most likely be very soft. Kuroo has thought of it before. The happening. The touching.

 

And that’s something new for him, wanting something so much it threatens to burst out of his chest with the sheer violence of feeling. Uncharted waters. The surface of the moon, beaming down at him from outer space.

 

It’s too far away, so he won’t ever be able to get there. It’s too far away, so it’s all right if he tries to.

 

Kuroo knows a lot of things, but he doesn’t know how to build a rocket ship that’ll take him that far. It’s better that way.

 

//

 

They meet amid the uniform clutter in Bokuto’s room.

 

Date, time, what to bring, what to wear. Two weeks from now, nine in the morning, because the place Bokuto has in mind is far enough away by train that they’ll need to factor the commuting hours into their calculations, his wallet and the spirit of adventure, whatever he wants.

 

Kuroo is polite and snarky in the mellow, measured way he is when he’s not sure what to do with himself, sitting with his back against the photo-plastered wall, head to a glittering shot of Shibuya Crossing. Bokuto is the human embodiment of excitement. The memory of Sunday still fizzing like soda in the forefront of his mind, he wonders if maybe only one of them is still worried. That’s fine, he can do enough worrying for two, or more if need be. He can do horizon-watching while his fingers hover over the red button.

 

But, you know, _whatever he wants_ is about as vague as it gets, and Kuroo is no supermodel (clearly, as he reminds Bokuto wryly multiple times over the course of the afternoon). He has no idea what to wear, and threatens to show up in overalls if Bokuto doesn’t give him at least some sort of a guideline.

 

“Red,” Bokuto relents, reluctantly.

 

Their conversation is still kind of— stilted, uneven, like trying to get a full sentence out when you’re hiccuping every other second, but they agree on how to do this, and they agree to do this, and they will do it. Bokuto has his camera and a head full of pretty, floating daydreams. Kuroo has his house and his purple elephants and a vase full of chrysanthemums on his dining table.

 

He tells himself he wants to see them first-hand, pretty daydreams from a pretty soul, so they will do this.

 

//

 

Bokuto turns up on his doorstep at five minutes to nine, asking if Kuroo is ready.

 

Kuroo is not ready. He’s dressed in a shirt and the ready-to-suffocate-your-legs variety of skinny jeans with a red jacket thrown on for good measure, but he can’t find the spirit of adventure. There’s a purple elephant sitting on his bed like a ghost and it’s telling him this is a bad idea, that he has to shut the fuck up, that he has to stay at home.

 

Bokuto tries again.

 

“ _If you don’t reply I’m going to assume you hit something and fell and passed out and call the police,_ ” he bellows from the other side of the door, but it comes out muffled and less intense in Kuroo’s room. The elephant dissolves into the morning sunlight.

 

“Coming,” Kuroo calls back, shaking the ink blot of color out of his vision. He catches his own reflection in the mirror on the way out. Tries on a smile.

 

He catches Bokuto’s eyes in the hallway outside, and feels his lips split into a grin of their own accord.

 

//

 

In general, it should be known that Bokuto at five a.m. is like a toddler high on maybe three bags of fizzy grape candies, while Bokuto at maybe two in the afternoon is like the same toddler, except higher. Bokuto in the evening is either dead to the world or a firecracker in human shape, ready to set the entire night on fire with his laugh.

 

What Kuroo learns today, is that Bokuto before a photoshoot is all of the above, but brighter.

 

As they ease their way into the train carriage, the surrounding throng presses them further and further inside until they’re flat against the doors on the other side. Kuroo peers at Bokuto from under the mess of his bangs. He’s glancing out the window with an absent minded smile lingering on his face and his camera bag slung across his back, all of six foot one and twenty-five with a windbreaker that’s the color of the moon, vibrating with the sheer energy of being alive. He notices Kuroo’s eyes on him after a while, turns his smile towards him. It’s like watching the sun emerge from behind storm clouds. Kuroo has to bite the inside of his mouth to stop himself from hot air ballooning right out of the crowd.

 

They don’t talk much on the first train. Too many people, too much morning lethargy. Kuroo and Bokuto’s lifestyles mean Monday mornings can be anything they want them to be on most days— the same can’t be said for majority of the working population in Tokyo. Drowsy murmurs and yawns stretched out like taffy bounce intermittently off the bluish-white interior of the carriage.

 

They switch lines after that, and the second train is only half-full, so their shoulders aren’t touching, but they’re still standing. Bokuto tells him a bit about where they’re going. _Hachioji_ , he says, reverent, and then stops talking after that.

 

Kuroo wants to say _tell me more,_ half out of genuine curiosity, half so he can hear Bokuto’s voice again, which is still loud because this _is_ Bokuto, after all, but is hushed like how children try to whisper but end up being overheard by everyone in the vicinity after all. He thinks it’s adorable. _Tell me more. Tell me something else._

 

But the scenery streaks past like watercolor, and the turquoise light continues filtering in through the windows like a distant song, and the train rumbles on.

 

//

 

Kuroo’s always liked trains.

 

Not every sort of train in the world or anything, and not even the concept of them, just the ones here. The trains in Tokyo. These snaking metal serpents, winding in and out of stations like secrets, connecting the disparate parts of the city like the wobbly lines of a join-the-dots worksheet. Creating spaces, creating conversation.

 

When the sun is up light pours in through the windows in shades of ocean-blue and turquoise and aquamarine; in the evening the sunset cuts like a knife across the floor, dyes the white of dress shirts and uniform tops in technicolor. Past midnight train carriages are liminal spaces, hushed and suspended and surreal, low conversation drifting from one end to another like the bitten-off heads of snakes.

 

So, really, Kuroo’s always liked Tokyo. Even with its shitty cramped apartment-block elevators and ridiculous Friday night crowds, it’s always been vivid like this. A sunspot of activity, radiating that odd warmth that brews between strangers, between here and there, today and tomorrow. Radiating life.

 

Kuroo’s always loved the city.

 

After the second transfer the sea of people dissolves into a trickle: a pair of old ladies in floral prints and delicate leather shoes, a girl dressed like a rockstar with five piercings in her left ear, a guy who looks like a tourist sporting a glossy American Tourister suitcase and huge sunglasses. They finally get seats after an hour on their feet spent clinging to the handles for dear life. It’s great.

 

Kuroo sits down and Bokuto slides into the seat to his left. He stiffens without meaning to, breath sucked in and held like a tightrope trick somewhere in his chest, but nothing happens. Bokuto presses his head against the window behind him and watches the ceiling with his gold owl-eyes, feigning ignorance at the three inches of quiet between them.

 

It takes Kuroo a second to identify the dull twang of emotion in his stomach. It takes him another to give it a name: disappointment.

 

After all, this is Bokuto Koutarou, who is big warm bear-hugs and loud elevator conversations and flower-shop fanfare. Who won’t hesitate to wrap an arm around Kuroo’s shoulders but will let go the moment he tenses up.

 

Who understands _personal space_ when it asks to be respected like a dinner date rejection.

 

Maybe the memory of Sunday hasn’t left either of their minds, at all.

 

Kuroo doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have the right to.

 

//

 

In spite of it all, they still talk. They have to talk. Bokuto thrives off aimless chatter and Kuroo cannot stand silence when it sticks like gum in his throat.

 

Bokuto tells him about Hachioji, about boardwalks and main streets and skyscrapers situated next to funny old buildings, and Kuroo listens and nods and inserts a comment here and there, laughs a little here and there, watches the way Bokuto’s expression loosens up to accommodate the moods that flit across his face like a highlight reel. They reach their stop, and as they leave the station the townscape opens up before them like a delicate paper fan. The weight of it all grows fractionally lighter with the cool air on his face and Bokuto buzzing beside him.

 

“Ready?” Bokuto asks, half-hesitant, half-hopeful. His silver windbreaker billows up around him like a superhero’s cape.

 

Brushing his reservations aside, Kuroo grins.

 

“Yeah.”

 

Across the streets they go. Windblown, wary, wondering.

 

//

 

Kuroo’s seen the impressive array of Bokuto’s work before. He’s seen how Bokuto breathed life into concrete heartlines and ash-flavored skylines. He’s seen the end products of magic tricks by nightfall.

 

What Kuroo has not seen before is Bokuto vaulting a rusted wire fence with far too much ease and far too little hesitation to be considered normal. They’re in the middle of Tokyo, but the signage on the fence says _WARNING TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED_ in big, block-lettered English. The writer in Kuroo loves it immediately. The logical part of his brain that wants to live a peaceful life informs him of the possible ramifications of doing this, which include getting shot on sight by a red-faced American man carrying an AK-47.

 

The nameless part of him, the part that wants those hands on his shoulders again, tells him to follow Bokuto over the fence. He does that.

 

The fence is lower than it’d looked from afar. Kuroo lands with both feet planted in the grass, and trails after Bokuto as he plunges into the undergrowth. As they trudge through the afternoon sun, Bokuto pulls out his camera and hooks the strap over his neck. He holds it up to his eyes and then points it at Kuroo, who is examining his surroundings with avid interest.

 

Kuroo looks up just in time to meet the telltale click of the shutter. “Are you gonna tell me where we are, or do I have to ask?”

 

“Patience, young grasshopper.” Bokuto keeps walking. “Just a little bit more.”

 

“Until?”

 

“Patience,” Bokuto says again, as serious as he is earnest, bursting with the same excitement he'd carried with him to Kuroo’s front door in the morning.

 

And the patience is worth it, despite Kuroo’s concerns and curiosities, because a while later the sprawl of jungle gives way to a beaten path half-swallowed by the forest, which ends abruptly in front of a large clearing.

 

“Welcome—” Bokuto says, and his eyes are doing the million-watt light bulb thing again, the one Kuroo can't look away from.

 

“—to my little corner of the world.”

 

//

 

Of course, it isn't really his, and the world is much too big to be going around looking for hidden corners with scenic backdrops to declare as your own exclusive property. Bokuto just wanted to be dramatic about things. He's an artist, after all. Artists are dramatic and apathetic and everything else in between, depending on the time of the day. Artists are human.

 

“It's an abandoned US air base,” Bokuto explains when Kuroo nudges him for more details. “Up until the late 1960’s it was still lively as all hell, but then everyone left. A third of it was renovated, a third got turned into a park, and the last bit just got kinda left there. That’s where we are— the left there bit.”

 

The confidence in his stride is a gorgeous thing, Kuroo thinks, as if Bokuto knows this entire place inside out. As if this air base really _is_ his secret. He narrowly avoids collision with a fallen banister and then slips into a moss-encrusted building.

 

“Be careful,” Bokuto warns as Kuroo ducks his head to avoid contact. “The floor’s fallen through in some places.”

 

“Living life on the edge, I see,” Kuroo comments idly, but there's no bite to it, and he's far less concerned than he should be. Bokuto is right. The inside of this building looks something like a deconstructed mummy, the walls bright and barren and littered with chips in the plaster, the ceiling and floor potholed. Cracks run up and down every visible surface like a face full of makeup come undone. There's graffiti on the wall.

 

In the late afternoon haze sunlight trickles into the room, an avalanche of warmth and color. It illuminates the graffiti like a spotlight, turns the crude, uneven lines of it into something child-soft.

 

“I’ve always lived like that,” Bokuto agrees.

 

“It's pretty fucking cool.” Kuroo tilts his face up to catch the light, and closes his eyes. “This place, and your ability to find places like this, too.”

 

He doesn't need to see it to know Bokuto’s beaming at him. He never needs to. Visual confirmation is nothing when Bokuto carries the very essence of life in his veins and capillaries, radiates energy like a firefly burns away the darkness around it.

 

But Kuroo means it, too. They've gone into a couple of buildings now— barracks, mess halls, control rooms, communication centers with entire panels of round buttons left untouched and dust-kissed in remembrance of some disconnected era. Some of them are closer to the underworld, their wire skeletons visible under the peeled banana walls; others are almost perfectly intact, as if their occupants might walk back in at any moment, gold skinned and clad in ash-colored uniforms.

 

The air base is— sort of like the liminal spaces in midnight trains. Connected to the rest of the world by a thin cable; suspended, corpse-quiet in its own silence. Uniform in its coarse, wildfire melancholy.

 

And contrary to his expectations, Bokuto with a camera in hand and the world brimming at his fingertips is subtle. Thoughtful. He’s still loud, still bigger than life, but he is all of these things carefully.

 

If Kuroo had to put a name to it he’d call him swanlike. The concentration in his knitted brows, his camera turned like a spotlight to the ceiling rafters, Kuroo, the sky, Kuroo, the smudge of graffiti on the rusted metal door, hanging off its hinges. Bokuto’s minimalist movements, the elegance with which he transitions from one shot to the next, all of it screams _love, love, love._ Screams it softly.

 

Bokuto the photographer is beautiful. If Kuroo had to put a name to it, he’d call him swanlike.

 

//

 

Lunch (or dinner, honestly, given the position of the sun above them) is a quiet affair, wrapped up and tucked away snugly in one of the compound’s sounder structures. It finally occurs to Bokuto, after about two hours of everything-enamored exploration, to mention to Kuroo that there _is_ still a single communications tower in use, which means patrols and security and the very real possibility of getting caught.

 

“I don’t want to be shot on sight by a red-faced American man carrying an AK-47,” Kuroo deadpans, expression serious.

 

“Not gonna happen,” Bokuto waves him off through a mouthful of rice from a bento container which he had supplied, Kuroo having literally brought nothing except his phone, train card, and wallet. And the spirit of adventure. “I’ve been here a thousand times. They haven’t killed me yet.”

 

“ _Yet._ ”

 

“If we do get caught, you can say I threatened and coerced you into trespassing with me.”

 

“Thanks. Always knew I could count on you.”

 

When they’re done, Bokuto leads him into another building, even more decrepit than the last few and sporting a delicate, washed-out green exterior. It’s rotten from the inside out like the gap-toothed smile of a child, but the walls are thick where they still exist and its interior is dim, shadowy.

 

“You might want to watch your step here too, there’s a lot of crap on the—”

 

Bokuto doesn’t get to finish his sentence because Kuroo’s sneaker catches on something and he pitches forward. In a snap, the camera bounces back to its position around his neck and Bokuto’s rushing forward, arms outstretched, catching Kuroo before he hits the ground. The rather nasty, littered-with-rusty-nails-and-sharp-ceiling-bits ground.

 

“—Floor,” Bokuto finishes, pulling Kuroo upright easily. “That could’ve been nasty.”

 

Kuroo winces at his own carelessness, and at the thought of those nails and his skin in a twisted caricature of loving union. “Yeah.” His gaze drops to where Bokuto’s got his wrist in an iron grip. It betrays the lightheartedness in his voice. It betrays a lot.

 

“Thanks,” he adds, because he feels like he should say something else.

 

Bokuto gazes back at him, contemplative.

 

“Okay, so here’s the plan: I’m gonna hold onto you until we get out of this building,” he finally says, shifting his grasp so his fingers are interlocked with Kuroo’s.

 

“Oho? Scared now, aren’t we.”

 

“Scared for you, dumbass, yeah.”

 

Kuroo wants to protest. Social conventions and underlying intentions and purple elephants with accusatory, beady eyes dictate that he should put up a bigger fight. But Kuroo does not, by any means, fancy another experience like the last, and Bokuto clearly knows his way around, so he trusts him. Lets him gently pull on his wrist, tugging Kuroo forward. Lets him keep their hands linked in a grounding touch, a sun-soaked prayer.

 

“What about your photos?” he asks, moments later. The last thing Kuroo wants is to be an obstruction, an annoyance to Bokuto and his lens.

 

Bokuto doesn’t stop walking, just replies, matter-of-fact, “I’ve photographed pretty much every inch of this place already, actually. You’re the star of today’s show, and anyway, we haven’t gotten to the coolest part yet, so. It’s okay.”

 

“I see.”

 

Bokuto’s hand is warm against his wrist.

 

//

 

Somewhere between tip-toeing around doors graffitied with human-headed monsters and world-weary advice and pushing past thick tendrils of vivid green creepers, their excursion had stopped being an easy, clinical photoshoot and started being an adventure. The sort you have when you’re seven years old, picnic mat-cape flapping around your neck and the great unknown beckoning from your grandparents’ backyard. Kuroo used to squat in the shade of that skyscraper oak tree, plunge his hands into the dirt like it was full of rubies. Bokuto holds his hand like he's made of rubies.

 

They emerge from the other end of the A2-14 barracks into a different world. The blue sky has fallen, and in its place a peacock-faced stranger has risen. The air base looks unfamiliar, cast in more shadow than light, purples and oranges and reds coloring the grass like crayons.

 

“Oh shit,” Bokuto says, looking at the sky. “We gotta run.”

 

“Run where?” Kuroo asks, but the next thing he knows he's getting yanked along like a kite into the undergrowth again, their hands still linked.

 

This part of the compound feels like it’s never been touched even by the local wildlife, let alone humanity’s intrusive impulses. The wildflowers and sepia-colored weeds sprout from the ground with a kind of desperate intimacy, bowing forward into spaces that aren’t their own. The trees look older. Kuroo stops trying to process the blur of it all after a while, just lets Bokuto’s hands and feet and voice, saying something about how _this is the best part, you can't miss it Kuroo_ , carry him forward.

 

The forest grows denser and thicker and darker around them until it stops doing that, and starts breaking up like the beginnings of a constellation. Kuroo loses sight of the sun altogether, and then finds it again in increments.

 

The forest stops being a forest and starts being a vast expanse of nothingness. Bokuto comes to a halt at the edge of it.

 

“We’re here.”

 

Kuroo doesn’t need Bokuto to tell him what _here_ means, for once. There isn’t some bizarre looking contraption hidden under a half-rotted-away trapdoor or a fragment of some beaten up sign peeking out of a bush. There aren’t any secrets, not here.

 

Instead, there is a pair of parabolic dishes jutting like mismatched Ferris wheels out of the sky. Old as time, rusted red with sunset. Familiar, but remotely so, like the backyard in your childhood memories viewed through your the telescope in your neighbor’s attic.

 

Familiar, but also not. There had only been one dish in the photo caught underneath the elevator that day. One Ferris wheel. One square foot of yearning.

 

While Kuroo struggles to keep his heart someplace traceable with a GPS, Bokuto lets go of his hand and points.

 

“We’re gonna climb that,” he says.

 

Kuroo rediscovers control, temporarily.

 

“Why not the other one?”

 

Bokuto laughs. “Word of mouth says it’s not as stable.”

 

To this, Kuroo plants his hands on his hips and regards the metal monster with newfound respect.

 

“That makes two of us then.”

 

//

 

On Kuroo’s twenty-fifth birthday, he doesn’t make a wish.

 

After all, he’s already got everything he could possibly want. A stable(-ish) job, a best asshole friend, several asshole friends, a place to be. Physically, at least, if not metaphorically.

 

He throws a party anyway, because amid the doom and gloom of soot-colored briefcases and dress-shoe responsibilities, everyone wants to let go sometimes. Of that heavy burden, that unwanted Christmas present left in their classroom cubby-hole, forgotten with enthusiasm only to be dug up after enough time has passed. They’ve all dug it up by now. It lives with them, in their studio apartments and two-room apartments. It lives in them, under their skin.

 

Everyone wants to forget sometimes.

 

Kuroo does, almost. He gets hammered enough to start trying to do handstands in the kitchen, crashing into Sugawara, who is trying to kiss Daichi without being caught and not trying to do handstands at all. He watches Oikawa bend a fork in half and can’t tell afterwards if he imagined it happening or if Oikawa actually is an alien. He draws up a stranger out on the street, standing under a flickering streetlight, and almost kisses him.

 

Almost, almost, almost. Always almost. Never to the point. Beating around the bush like the main characters in novels always do, unwilling to face the lipstick scrawl on the mirror’s surface. Kuroo knows. He put those words there, years ago. They’re the reason no one follows him home.

 

Anyway the point is, Kuroo makes up his mind— made up his mind years ago— to stop trying to do things the way the cubby-hole letter tells him to. There are two Kuroo’s: one who still sees blue-ocean eyes and billowing curtains of sadness, one who goes to bed at night and feels cold. There is one Kuroo. There are two Kuroo’s, and both of them are liars.

 

He’s good at that. He’s good at that and the year has been reasonable, so Kuroo should never have to want for anything.

 

But Bokuto. But Bokuto.

 

//

 

On Kuroo’s twenty-fifth birthday, he doesn’t make a wish.

 

The parabolic dish that isn’t going to fall apart beneath their feet, frankly speaking, still feels like it’s going to fall apart beneath their feet. Kuroo wants to tell Bokuto that much, but there’s adrenalin in his veins and a beat in his head and Bokuto ahead of him like a road sign pointing home. They take the steps two at a time, flying.

 

The metal framework protests with every fraction of an inch they ascend, like it knows what they’re planning to do. Kuroo doesn’t know what they’re planning to do. For once, he’s all right with that.

 

The stairs take them to the base of the Ferris wheel. If either of them reached up on their tiptoes they could probably brush the curve of it with their fingertips, but they don’t do that. If either of them lost their balance and tipped over the edge they’d probably die. They’re maybe four or five storeys off the ground, poised on the edge of the whole compound like sailors high up in the crow’s nest of a ship. Just the two of them, like skyfarers, like magic.

 

When Kuroo finally yanks himself back onto the metal-webbed landing, Bokuto’s camera has already found its way into his hands. He holds it up to his eye.

 

Kuroo stares at him, a little clueless, a little afraid.

 

“So, uh, what do I do?”

 

Sensing the tension, Bokuto lowers his camera. Smiles a small smile that doesn’t seem very typically-Bokuto but is, in its candid simplicity, in its honesty. The sort of kindness that can kill. He smiles a smile like that, and it goes straight to Kuroo’s head.

 

He says, “Nothing. You can just be. Be here. Do whatever you want.”

 

“Just be,” Kuroo repeats, the words walking across his tongue like a stranger’s footfalls.

 

“Yeah.”

 

He leans back against the wire of the metal railing, elbows propped, head cocked to the side. Thinks of Kenma’s words, the stuffy too-warm _Gusto_ where their knees kept knocking into each other and for every glass empty there was another bursting out of someone’s hands. _Say something. Anything._

 

Kuroo is still bad at letting people in, and reaching out is always easier, so he does that first. He does that for now.

 

“Why—” Kuroo start-stops, rewinds.

 

“Why here?” The photo caught under the elevator hasn't left him, the yearning in that silhouette still blood-fresh, vital.

 

Bokuto lowers the camera enough that Kuroo can see his eyes, glinting over the top of the sleek black frame. He inhales like he’s trying to breathe the world into his lungs, looking for all that softness like he’s going to say something earth-shattering.

 

“Because you make this place feel less like a ghost-town.”

 

Kuroo was wrong. It is not earth-shattering. It is the opposite.

 

“That’s not really answering the question,” he quips back, no bite, all color. He’s wearing a smile like loose change and it’s slipping, Kuroo’s slipping.

 

“It is,” Bokuto insists. “I’ve always come here by myself to take photos and shit but, like, you’re bigger than this place. The way I thought you’d be.”

 

“I’m not,” Kuroo says, helpless and unwilling to show a shade of it. “I’m unsafe. _This_ is unsafe.”

 

Silence. Does Bokuto know what he’s talking about? There’s no way he does. Kuroo doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. Kuroo knows metaphor and simile and the city of Tokyo like the back of the back of his hand, the finer details of every nook and cranny of Akasaka, the lay of the land like he’s sprouted roots in the ground. Kuroo knows blue skin and blue eyes and other things, locked study rooms and bad twelve-year olds who ruin everything.

 

Kuroo knows how to describe the sunset in fifty-nine different ways, all of them beautiful, but everything falls short of the way Bokuto looks right now. Like a glass tapestry on the brink of breaking apart, like the color blue, like sadness.

 

Bokuto runs a hand through his hair, swan-tufts singed with red. He presses on.

 

“When I was seven, I climbed a tree.

 

(Behind them, the sun begins to sink.)

 

It wasn’t a very big tree, so I thought I’d be able to reach the top. Almost made it, too, but then I slipped halfway up, because I’m a dumbass, and instead of getting to the next branch I hit the ground. Head-first. Apparently it was a mess; spent eight hours in surgery while dad cried against a vending machine in the hallway and mom cried against his shoulder. When I woke up, the world looked all funny, like it’d turned into something else while I was gone. I never really got over that.”

 

Bokuto tells him this, low and neutral. It feels like he’s bared his skin and everything underneath that, too. All the bright things. All the bruised things.

 

“I’ve never been very good at getting over things, or people, but I can. If I have to. You can leave, if you want to.”

 

_Tell him something, anything._

 

See, there’s a purple elephant in his room with big looking-glass eyes, and it watches him, and it watches him, so Kuroo’s always kept his mouth shut. There’s a blue nightmare in his head that he’s never let out. There’s all this, and there's Bokuto, and that makes all the difference.

 

“I don’t know what I want,” he answers, and can’t find it in himself to pull the cat-smile or the fox-grin out of the box, so he lets his voice fall flat.

 

Bokuto looks at him, limned in fire-forged gold. He is equal parts awe-inspiring and terrifying; Kuroo is condemned to not-blink, not-breathe.

 

Still, on and on he goes.

 

“I should've taken the flowers that day. I think I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

 

(There are a lot of reasons Kuroo didn't take the chrysanthemums, and all of them are sad.)

 

“I’m sorry. I still don't really know what I want.”

 

(There are a lot of reasons Kuroo turned out the way he is now, and all of them are sad.)

 

The words don’t come easy— the most important ones never do. But they come nonetheless, puncture wound-words that leave candy trails of blood in their wake. Once they're out they stay out, so he can't put them back inside of himself again. So they're here now, Kuroo standing at the top of the winding staircase and telling Bokuto, _you can take the first step. You can come a bit closer._

 

And oh, he really has no idea what the fuck he's doing.

 

But Bokuto’s face is sad and lovely with bright things in it, like a bruise blue ballad, like a hurt lessened and still hurting.

 

“You’re allowed to want things for yourself,” he says, so soft Kuroo swears he feels the words in his chest more than he hears them. So soft that Kuroo’s afraid he isn't real.

 

Maybe this isn't real. Is Kuroo hearing things right? Kuroo is hearing nothing, something, everything. It's getting inside of his head and doing funny shit to his thoughts, rearranging the landscape of his heart, taking a torch to a dead memory. There’s something bigger beneath the surface of Bokuto’s words. Something like forgiveness.

 

And it doesn't shatter the planet— it stitches it right up.

 

//

 

Letting people in is hard. Reaching out is easy. Standing with Bokuto in the middle of nothingness, heading nowhere and waiting for nothing to happen is even easier.

 

Kuroo’s gotten very good at smiling over the years, so he knows what he should do at this juncture in the story, with the sun this close to nothing and the sky this close to fading to black.

 

Kuroo’s gotten very good at smiling over the years, so he should have one for right now. It’s all he knows how to do. It’s all he’s got.

 

Except maybe right now it isn’t about what he can do, but rather, what he can’t. What Kuroo can’t do is cheshire-cat his way out this situation with a twirl of his top hat and a swish of his coattails. What Kuroo can’t do, for once, is try to hide.

 

The silver of Bokuto’s oversized windbreaker glints in the final, final vestiges of day. Night falls, and stays there.

 

Kuroo says, “I haven’t been very cool. My high school self would be disappointed. He’d probably punch me in the face.”

 

Bokuto laughs a laugh made of pure moonlight. It works its way into Kuroo’s heart, setting off rocket-launchers in the uneven terrain inside.

 

“Well then, that makes two of us.”

 

Kuroo raises an eyebrow. Bokuto looks at him sheepishly.

 

“I hope you don’t mind— I was shooting the whole time.”

 

What’s left of Kuroo’s pride would argue that the appalled look on his face is more intentionally dramatic than it is genuine. What’s left of everything else flies into a very large meteor and dies instantly.

 

Bokuto looks appropriately guilty anyway, the words scrambling to leave his lips. “Not the _whole_ whole time, I mean, just a little from when we were getting here and also the, uh, the end? Just now?”

 

Kuroo raises both his eyebrows as high as they’ll go, even though Bokuto will only be able to see one regardless. That doesn’t matter. It’s the meaning that counts. The meaning is, well, whatever it is.

 

Mainly, Bokuto looks cute as hell, flustered and pink in the cheeks but still sort of summery, like the young waiter that spills your soda and then apologizes with a cherry-red smile. Kuroo lets himself admit that. It’s a sweet admission.

 

“I’m sorry, I can delete them if you’d prefer—“

 

Kuroo interrupts him. “Are you putting these anywhere?”

 

“This is strictly a personal project,” Bokuto replies seriously.

 

He pretends to think about it for a while. Savors the moment like a lemon-shaped gummy, the sugar-coated sort. But Bokuto continues to look very serious, so Kuroo gives in.

 

“You can keep your photos.”

 

//

 

By the time they get out of the abandoned air base it’s nearly midnight. The sky, soaked in dipping quill ink, beams dully with starlight as two figures go stumbling through the silence, splitting it cleanly down the middle.

 

Back, back, back they go, past the abandoned barracks and the mess halls and the communication centers with panels upon panels of dusty red buttons. Past the beaten path and the sprawling jungle. Past the fence.

 

Over the fence, over the daydream, back to reality. Hachioji is a lullaby around them, winking hooded eyes back at their adventure-kissed selves as they fly past red men and green men, approving aliens, disapproving ones. They are intruders into a world that doesn’t belong to them, but Kuroo feels like they’re on top of it all, somehow. Right out on top, like standing on the peak of a mountain. Kuroo feels larger than life.

 

They make it onto one of the last few trains bound for Akasaka, because if this is a story then Kuroo is claiming the role of main character and omniscient narrator and he’s saying fuck you to narrative convention. Their carriage is empty, save for a guy in a Hawaiian shirt dozing with his head against the window across the aisle. Kuroo sits down. Bokuto joins him.

 

They make it onto one of the last few trains bound for Akasaka, and it’s empty, and this time when they sit down there aren’t three whole inches of quiet between them. Instead, there is this indescribable thing in Kuroo’s chest like a string of Christmas lights trying to burst right out of his lungs. Instead, there is light.

 

“What do you think of purple elephants,” he asks, ready to fall asleep or into Bokuto, whichever is easier. His head feels clearer than it’s felt in years. It’s revolutionary.

 

“I think they’d be cool, if they existed.” Bokuto’s voice sounds like coffee. Emerging from the depths of his rational mind, a Kenma-shaped shadow tells him that voices can’t sound like coffee. Fuck it, whatever. It’s twelve a.m., Bokuto’s voice sounds like coffee, and Kuroo wants to drink that shit.

 

“Nah,” Kuroo replies, clicking his tongue in disapproval. “Purple elephants are full of shit. I can vouch for that.”

 

“Well.”

 

The city’s a blur outside their window, all blue and red and purple as if a child had taken their grubby paint-stained hands and smeared the stuff all over. Kuroo lets his own attention drift and suddenly Bokuto is not sitting straight-backed in his seat, but leaning into Kuroo’s space.

 

The proximity means shoulders and elbows and knees and Kuroo is fifteen again, watching a girl’s hands as she twists her fingers in her hair, pulls it up into a ponytail. Fifteen, binocular-eyes trained on Kenji from climbing, Kouki from kayaking.

 

Maybe Kuroo’s never really had the chance to be fifteen. Maybe this is only happening now.

 

He can live with that.

 

Kuroo can’t tell if Bokuto’s doing it on purpose or just being Bokuto, but it’s nice either way, so he leans back into Bokuto and all his inexplicable coffee-warmth. Bokuto is ridiculously, unfairly warm. Has anyone ever told him that? Kuroo wants to, needs to tell him that. Kuroo needs to tell him _thank you for coming into my house and not running away from the misshapen sadness on the walls_ but he’s seeing stars.

 

“I don’t know what you think of me,” Bokuto’s saying, sounding like sunshine at the bottom of the swimming pool. “But I think you’re beautiful.”

 

Is Kuroo dying? Kuroo is drowning, willingly, sinking to the bottom of the pool with tingling shoulders and elbows and knees and the swans in snorkeling gear paddling in slow circles around him. And the swans.

 

Sleep carries him under, welcoming.

 

//

 

They stumble home together, tripping down sidewalks and empty backlit roads and into each other. Drunk on the ephemerality of sleepless, singing Tokyo. Drunk on life itself.

 

Kuroo’s feet take him where his brain can’t seem to follow, through the narrow walkway fraught with construction work, past the family mart across the street, through the lobby, into the cramped elevator. It spits them out on their floor with a cheerful _ding._

 

“Thank you for today,” Kuroo says. It’s not quite the revelation he wants to give up, but that can wait. So he says thank you for today, and smiles big and crooked and real. As real as he can make it. As real as he knows how to be.

 

Bokuto pauses in front of his own door, shoelaces half-untied. He nods, expression soft with sleep and sincerity.

 

“Thank you for coming.”

 

//

 

The night after they go to the abandoned US air base, Kuroo collapses into bed with his leaf-encrusted red jacket still hanging off his torso, and promptly falls asleep.

 

In this dream they’re standing inside the old house again. The blue on the living room wall blinks at him, unseeing. The world outside the shuttered windows doesn’t exist. Beside him, child-Kuroo draws circles in the soft carpet with his feet.

 

After a while, child-Kuroo speaks.

 

_Do you like this house?_

 

Kuroo looks at the two-seater sofa and the mahogany dining table with the chipped off corner, the cracks in the ceiling.

 

_Not really._

 

The scene changes. Stop, stutter, smile—

 

They’re in the hallway of the second floor. It’s a dark, serpentine thing, hissing with indeterminable terrors, every closed door a full stop at the end of a long, long sentence. Kuroo remembers this place too. He knows where the light switches are, which floorboards creak the loudest, where grubby hands have left crayon marks on the walls.

 

Child-Kuroo has his hand on the doorknob, and it’s dark, but Kuroo remembers everything about this place, so he knows where it leads.

 

The study looks exactly the same. The mountain-stacks of documents, the gaudy sushi tie hanging off the swivel chair, the fox-shaped glass paperweight on the desk. The sadness, like a hot brand, burnt into every inch of it.

 

Child-Kuroo hops onto the swivel chair, spinning around to look at Kuroo. The motion kicks up a cloud of dust, silver and red.

 

_I used to like this room a lot_ , he says, swinging his legs. He’s still short enough that they don’t reach the floor. He’s still small enough. _But I’m not so sure anymore._

 

Kuroo blinks and they’re back in the living room, the shadow of their mother like a funeral song over their heads.

 

The wind chimes make a sound when child-Kuroo swipes at them with his outstretched fingertips. He turns back to look at Kuroo, eyes innocent, questioning.

 

_Do you like mom?_

 

Kuroo swallows. Thinks about laundry cycles and gas stoves and band-aids hugging small, small fingers. The childhood he never had.

 

He sits down on the sofa where a ghost used to curl up, see-through and silk-quiet.

 

_I never hated her,_ he thinks.

 

Child-Kuroo nods with understanding far beyond his years. It makes Kuroo’s heart hurt.

 

Everything runs away from him and when he comes to again they’re in the kitchen. Child-Kuroo is sitting in the cupboard under the sink, knees hugged to his chest and arms wrapped around them. He smiles brightly up at Kuroo.

 

_Do you hate me?_

 

Kuroo’s face crumples.

 

_How could I ever? You tried so hard. You tried so fucking hard. You just wanted to be happy._

 

He squats down so they’re seeing eye-to-eye, Kuroo and his own apparition, two halves of a broken thing. He extends a hand forward, palms turned up.

 

_It’s okay to come out. You don’t have to play hide and seek anymore._

 

Child-Kuroo moves out into the light.

 

—The next thing he knows they’re standing outside, in the front yard with its too-tall grass and crooked mailbox. Child-Kuroo’s hand is small and warm in his.

 

And this is a dream, which means Kuroo’s the omniscient narrator even if he doesn’t always know it. Which means if he wants Molotov cocktails, he gets Molotov cocktails.

 

He wants Molotov cocktails.

 

The house looks almost redeemable when consumed by flames and fury, the sadness fizzing out of it like bottled soda loses its fury after a day. Day-old sadness, day-old despair. Yesterday’s story.

 

_I hate this fucking house_ , he tells child-Kuroo, whose eyes are lit orange and red and gold.

 

When there’s nothing left of purple elephants and blue walls, they walk away into the nothingness.

 

Child-Kuroo says one last thing, his peach-smooth features already starting to disappear. Says, _you ___ him, don’t you?_

 

Kuroo holds his hand just a little bit tighter.

 

_Yeah. I love him._

 

//

 

When Kuroo turns twenty-five, he doesn’t make a wish immediately. Instead, he stands around drinking coffee in the kitchen, humming old pop songs the kids probably don’t know anymore. He does this for a pretty long time.

 

Nine months later, he wakes up one morning with his bedroom empty, his heart healing. There’s sunshine knocking on the mismatched curtains and a text notification on his phone, and only one person he knows who would text someone at five in the morning like it’s a perfectly sane thing to do.

 

Kuroo makes a wish.

 

//

 

The photos are really good. Not just good good, commendable-effort-good or movie-poster-good, but the sort of good that should be put up in a museum. The sort of good that gets printed in history books.

 

Once he’s gotten past the initial embarrassment of seeing himself in alarmingly high definition, wearing approximately three hundred expressions indicating varying degrees of awe, horror, and a mixture of both, even Kuroo can tell that much.

 

The photos are really fucking good. They’re so good he thinks Bokuto should do something with them after all. Maybe Kuroo will get his first modeling gig, wearing blood-red lipstick and posing against a backdrop of thorny roses or something. It would be kind of funny.

 

Not that that really matters. The main point is, Bokuto’s made Kuroo look human the way photographs aren’t supposed to be able to. If he tried hard enough, Kuroo thinks he’d be able to fall right back into that place, tumbling headfirst into the sprawling undergrowth. If he tries hard enough, Kuroo thinks he can see why Bokuto says those things he always says about him.

 

But Bokuto just smiles at him from his spot on the floor, and says, “I’m not sharing them with anyone.” He sounds kind of proud and kind of smug, leaning against his living room sofa, and it does all sorts of unspeakable things to Kuroo’s heart.

 

It’s ten at night, Bokuto’s apartment aglow with functional ceiling lights and non-functional gimmicks, lanterns and flashlights and strings of fairy lights. The walls of his apartment are sunflower yellow, to no one’s surprise. His cutlery is polished and clean and has constellations punched into the handles.

 

Bokuto had texted earlier on in the evening, luring Kuroo out with the promise of store-bought sweets, so he had come knocking and they had had Cozy Corner apple pies and cream puffs, and then Bokuto had dropped a pile of photographs on the coffee table and told Kuroo, _look._

 

Kuroo is still looking. It’s been maybe an hour since he picked up the first photograph, and the pile has begun to dwindle. He stretches on the sofa, the motion lithe and cat-like. Stifles a yawn. Reaches over Bokuto’s head and nicks the next one carefully between two fingers.

 

_Oh._

 

Kuroo jerks upright abruptly.

 

“Oh.”

 

Bokuto twists his torso and angles his head so he can look at the photo in Kuroo’s fumbling hands.

 

“I like this shot,” he comments amicably.

 

On any other day Kuroo would’ve responded with a quip here, half cynical and half real. _You like all your shots, and so do I, hotshot. No, seriously. I love them._ Something like that.

 

On any other day Kuroo would’ve done any manner of things, but today he is a little buzzed on sugar and there’s a song in his head again, low and promising.

 

“Wait a sec—” he calls as he jumps to his feet and crosses the threshold from Bokuto’s apartment to his own, skids into his bedroom, plunges his hands into the second drawer under his desk.

 

He retrieves a single photograph.

 

By the time Kuroo returns to Bokuto’s, the latter has migrated from the floor to the couch, easily occupying half its space with his broad shoulders and equally broad smile. Kuroo thinks thrice before settling beside him, but does so anyway.

 

It’s a small couch. The couch. It is small.

 

Anyway—

 

“About that photo, the one you said you liked just now,” Kuroo starts, reaching for the print where he’d left it to float away on the coffee table. He rests it face-up on his knees and then retrieves the other photo from his pocket. Bokuto presses closer, owl-eyes twinkling with curiosity.

 

“It reminded me of something. When you first moved here, back in June, you dropped this.” Kuroo points at the lone parabolic dish, the reddish-purple sky, the shadow of yearning.

 

“And it reminded me of that. The photo you said you liked. It reminded me.”

 

The photographs are not identical. This is a fact that would likely be clear to anyone, from a small child with distracted hands to a time-hardened adult. One of them is closer to sunset than sun-up, and it’s the one with sadness in it, the emptier photograph. One of them has more ground than sky.

 

The photographs are not identical. One of them is nothing but sad, and you can’t call the other happy, not really, but it is certainly close.

  
It’s similar— in the background a single, towering parabolic dish rises, rust-red and bleeding out of the tangle of sepia-colored weeds. In the foreground is Kuroo, red jacket like fire and eyes squeezed shut as a laugh bubbles out of his mouth, cherry-soda brilliant. The bubbles are soap bubbles. The soap bubbles smell like watermelon.

 

Kuroo looks like he’s having the time of his life.

 

It must have been taken after Bokuto had told some childish joke or another, tossed a careless grin over his shoulder at Kuroo while he questioned the sanctity of their actions. Kuroo doesn’t remember what Bokuto had said, but he remembers the feeling of it, the aftermath, feeling fifteen and fearless like the protagonist of an old Taylor Swift song. Kuroo remembers that brilliance.

 

And that’s just how it works, how the sheer vibrancy of Kuroo in his red jacket and star-streaked laughter lends an entirely different color to the image. It’s almost like the two photos were taken in different dimensions, different pockets of time. Different realities.

 

If the first one has to be lonely, then the second is a love story.

 

Bokuto makes a funny, strangled noise in the back of his throat. Kuroo flicks his gaze to him, and suddenly Bokuto isn’t slouched so comfortably against the pillows anymore. There’s a tense line in his posture, a shaky quality to his features as he looks back at Kuroo.

 

_Oh._

 

Kuroo folds his nervousness into his hands, holds Bokuto’s gaze like a promise.

 

“That photo with me in it. How’d it turn out like that?” he asks quietly.

 

It’s almost as if Bokuto needs the proximity alongside his words to explain, to lend a proper weight to the gravity of the situation. He shifts, fractionally, closer.

 

“Because of you,” he answers, honesty a low note in his voice, nothing more than a whisper.

 

Kuroo will not flinch. Bokuto is close enough now that Kuroo can make out the sweet curl of his lashes, delicate and silvery. Bokuto is close enough now that Kuroo can feel his breath on his cheeks.

 

Kuroo will not run away.

 

“How—” Kuroo has to pause, the air catching in his lungs, the world pausing on its axis. All the ceiling lights and gimmicky lanterns and strings of fairy lights in the room, holding their breaths.

 

“—very cliche.”

 

The rough quality of embarrassment has evaporated from Bokuto’s shoulders. He looks sharper now, more in-focus, and yet at the same time softer, like morning light, like the curve of a hand splayed in white bed sheets.

 

“Do you mind,” Bokuto says, half a question, half lidded-eyes and careful countenance.

 

(You see, Kuroo’s always wanted and wanted and never had, Kuroo’s never received, Kuroo’s heart has been clawing at the walls of his bone-cage for years now.

 

You see, Kuroo’s always wanted.)

 

_Fuck it,_ he thinks.

 

Kuroo closes his eyes, and he closes his eyes, and kisses him.

 

//

 

Bokuto Koutarou moves into the apartment unit next door on Saturday.

 

At first Kuroo doesn’t know what to make of him. He is loud and soap-opera vivid and owns a huge silver windbreaker that looks like the moon, which he carries almost everywhere with him. He has eyes like pure gold. His smile looks like the start of summer.

 

At first, Kuroo doesn’t know what to do with himself. Bokuto’s voice is meant to be flung off rooftops, the kind that rebounds off the walls and then hits you in the face on the way out of the window. He calls out Kuroo’s name after giving him white chrysanthemums and then again, afterwards, whenever they meet in the lobby or the hallway or the family mart across the street. He calls out Kuroo’s name.

 

Bokuto Koutarou moves into Kuroo’s heart somewhere between the day he catches Bokuto taking a photo of him on the rooftop and the night Bokuto spends watching over him as he tosses and turns with fevered dreams. Kuroo doesn’t realize this until much, much later, after they’ve built more bridges and then burned some and then snuck into private property like a pair of twelve year-olds. It happens anyway.

 

Bokuto the freelance photographer breaks into the metaphorical apartment of Kuroo’s heart and then shines a torchlight on all the broken places. Holds his camera in his pretty hands, and takes a million photos. Looks at the tear stains on the walls. Calls them beautiful.

 

But Bokuto is the one who is beautiful, Kuroo thinks.

 

Bokuto likes going for runs around the neighborhood at five a.m. in the morning but almost always ends up lost in some unrecognizable alleyway of Tokyo, wandering the streets with twilight in his eyes. He prefers Pocari Sweat over Aquarius but only because of the packaging. He is a hideous, hideous morning person. His favorite animal is the owl.

 

He’s never been good at getting over people or things, and it’s made him kinder, somehow, the pencil-lines of old pain etched into his eyes, his lips, his hands. He’s never been good at anything but being gentle, and it breaks every rule in the rulebook.

 

Kuroo doesn’t realize he’s in love with him until much, much later, but he does.

 

It takes him a while, but he does.

 

//

 

It’s four o’clock on the dot when Kuroo knocks on Bokuto’s front door, hands tucked neatly behind his back and heart bobbing like a boat in his throat.

 

He’s greeted with silence, and more of it, and then— a crash.

 

The door swings open, revealing a only slightly disheveled, slightly flustered Bokuto.

 

“Oh, hey!” he grins, smile backyard firework-bright even though his face is still blurred with sleep.

 

“Hey.” Kuroo feels his lips quirk upwards of his own accord. Things always happen of their own accord around Bokuto. Kuroo’s finally accepted this.

 

“So… What’s up?”

 

Kuroo looks at Bokuto; his eyes are hooded and his hair is falling into his eyes instead of doing its usual gravity-defying trick and there are faint creases on his cheek from where he must have slept with it pressed up against his pillow.

 

He takes a deep breath, counts to three in his head.

 

“Hi, I’m Kuroo Tetsurou, your next-door neighbor. I like strong coffee, and sleeping in on Sundays, and I’m in love with you.”

 

Kuroo holds out the white chrysanthemums.

 

There’s a split second in which Bokuto just stands there, mouth slightly ajar and eyes glittering. There’s a split second in which Kuroo falters.

 

And then Bokuto’s grabbing Kuroo by the wrist and pulling him forward and pressing their lips together, and then Bokuto’s kissing him, and his hands on Kuroo’s face are so gentle it’s like he’s cradling blown glass, and Kuroo’s hands are in his hair, that pretty gray and white swan-hair, and it’s exactly how Kuroo imagined it’d feel, so soft he thinks he’s going to melt. Kuroo thinks he’s never going to be sad again.

 

“Took you long enough,” Bokuto murmurs against his lips, his voice a deep, pleasant rumble, still rough with sleep around the edges. His eyes are so bright they’re like headlights in the darkness. Kuroo’s so giddy he thinks he’s going to float right up into the sky.

 

And it’s absurd, how Kuroo picked four a.m. because he was petty and wanted to be the one with the more put-together smile when he ends up kind of falling apart in Bokuto’s arms anyway. It’s absurd how much Kuroo’s changed.

 

It’s absurd that Bokuto kisses like spring when they’re already walking into fall, but for once, Kuroo chooses not to question it.

 

Because the world is bigger than your overgrown backyard. The world is everything kind and everything cruel rolled into one, and we’re all born into it holding a pair of dice in our child-small hands, so we throw them. And sometimes the end result sucks, sometimes it’s terrible, but sometimes you get a good roll. Sometimes the sun appears on your front doorstep and looks at your paper smile and calls it beautiful.

 

Kuroo is twenty-five and a little in love with the whole world.

 

So he threads his fingers into Bokuto’s hair and kisses him harder. So he lets Bokuto in.

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs)
> 
>  
> 
> wrote something with a functional plot for the first time in all my stupid 17 years of life. please clap.
> 
> (bullshit)  
> please also clap me like in the face or something. i mean slap. while i was gone for a year i graduated from secondary school made it into junior college fell madly in love five times failed at all of them and picked up figure skating again. then i went back to tokyo in june and i was bored in line at disneysea so i downloaded some old haikyuu fic and then i was like oh fuck i like these characters so i resolved to catch up to haikyuu for the first time since 2016. i did it. i caught Up. and then i read more fic right before my midterms
> 
> (not bullshit)  
> 1\. the quote at the top is from Scheherazade by Richard Siken  
> 2\. the photoshoot location in this story is heavily inspired by [this place](https://offbeatjapan.org/fuchu-abandoned-us-air-force-base/)  
> 3\. i came across aperture when i was googling photography terminology. it's such a goddamn nice word. you should google it just for the sake of looking at more nice words, if you want to.  
> 4\. this fic is dedicated to [teesta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/batman). jaywalkers pulled me out of an extremely dramatic emotional and writing-specific slump and put so many feelings in me i broke my year-long prose writing hiatus. i wrote up a new year's resolution (v2.0) a week after finishing it and it's still on my wall right now. the resolution includes a lot of things but at the very end i wrote BRING TWO UMBRELLAS EVERYWHERE YOU GO and i would not have been able to write that without you, my dear new friend. so the dedication goes two ways: for the emotional support and for looking through this too, it means everything to me  
> 5\. finally, this fic is also dedicated to every single one of you who has made it this far, because i've been looking at the sky a lot lately (like seriously, like frequently enough that i keep almost tripping and hulk smashing my face into the ground when i'm walking home from school or heading to class) and you know what. it's a fucking pretty sky. we're fucking lucky to be here with it hanging over our heads like a ufo. if ufos hang, i mean. i spent 4 weeks writing this in between reading my history notes and suffering in japanese class but after getting high off sadness i wanted it to end on a good note and so it has ended and the not really hidden message is I WANT ALL OF YOU TO BE HAPPY. you deserve to be happy. you deserve good coffee or tea or water if you're weird like me and don't like coffee or tea. you deserve nice mornings when it's not too hot or too cold and strangers on the street smile at you and the bus pulls up just as you arrive at the bus stop. you deserve kindness.
> 
> so yeah! here's everything i've experienced in the past 365 days, all my setbacks and growth spurts and 17 year old birthday cakes, blended in a fruit blender (like for berry smoothies and stuff), poured into a story. bokuto and kuroo mean so much to me, and i hope i've brought you a little bit of the light they brought into my life. if you enjoyed this, please consider leaving a kudo or a comment, but as always- whatever floats your boat, kicks your dick, flaps your jack. you do you.
> 
> take care, and have a good one.


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